


Bad Boys: A Supernatural Rewrite

by Slanguage



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 9x07, Bad Boys, Canon, F/M, Rewrite, canon!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-04 21:50:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slanguage/pseuds/Slanguage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a rewrite in a narrative style of 9x07: Bad Boys. </p><p>I’ll be real—as a writer, I didn’t care at all for Adam Glass’s style of writing in this episode. The background was a good idea, but it was executed poorly. In no way do I claim to be a better writer than someone whose work is actually getting airtime, but I promised my friends at our Supernatural Tuesday event that I would rewrite the episode, in narrative format, so here we are. I’m adding a little bit of what I would have put, and some random stuff in here as well. It’s really just for fun. Approach at your own risk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act I, Part One

He was going to find out.

Dean ran a hand over his face as he ghosted through the silent bunker, forcing himself to just breathe. Sam was getting suspicious—Dean knew his brother better than he knew himself most of the time, and he knew the kind of look that Sam got when he was getting ready to call Dean out on his bullshit. He hadn’t been subtle enough, goddamn it—always so fucking paranoid about Sam getting pissed when he lied, always so fucking stupid about the words that come out of his mouth. Dean was a good liar, when he had to be, but he knew that Sam would see through him sooner rather than later, and he was slipping, painfully. And Sam was working on that computer in the bunker, saying that Charlie set it up for them to start tracking down where angels are—Dean wanted to punch himself, because it would be soon where Sam would figure out how to get it working, and the thing would freak the fuck out, finding an angel in the bunker; curiously right where Sam is fucking standing.

Dean fisted his hands in his hair. There was no way this was going to end well, and he knew it—so why wasn’t he trying to stop it?

Ezekiel had to have fixed him enough by now, right? What the hell was he waiting for, a formal written invitation? Dean was a suspicious soul, and the only reason he wasn’t breathing down Ezekiel’s neck was because he would be breathing down _Sam’s_ neck. Cas had said Zeke was a good soldier; Zeke had helped him out of binds, had healed Charlie and Sam and Cas. If Sam even got the sneaking suspicion that yet another angel was wearing him to the prom, he would eject Ezekiel faster than a cassette tape in the Impala, and he would probably be dead and gone before he hit the ground and Dean can’t keep fucking seeing that.

Worry gripped Dean’s chest, but it shattered into pieces to be forgotten until later when he heard the sound of his phone from the library start blaring, and he was moving for it automatically, not caring who it was—anything would be a healthy distraction from all of this worrying he was doing. He was going to go prematurely gray, and Dean Winchester would be damned (again) if he walked around all snow white.

Dean was a doorway away before he heard Sam answer the call skeptically. He was walking steadily toward his phone when his brother’s body language changed, his shoulders curling like he was between hanging up and laughing, and he replied to the person on the other end, “Uh, I’ve never heard of anyone named D-Dog—”

Dean’s hand snapped out and grabbed the phone with a new sense of urgency, a sudden shock rolling through his body like he’d been punched, and he was surprised how calm and natural his voice sounded when he said, “Hey, Sonny, what’s up?”

Sam gave him an incredulous look with a bit of a smirk, like he was mulling over the D-Dog nickname, but Dean couldn’t even see him the moment the voice he knew, although faded from his memory, choked out from the other side of the line, “Dean. Dean, we have something weird going on here. You deal with weird still?”

“Yeah.” Dean glanced at Sam, but was too nervous from all of the thoughts that have been branded into his mind all day to keep his eyes on his little brother for long. Sonny’s voice—Dean couldn’t believe he still remembered it. Thinking back to how many years it has been since he’s heard that voice (and trying not to think too hard about the number of those years), Dean’s surprised that Sonny would even remember him, and he’s surprised that he still recognizes that voice like he was sixteen again.

“I think it’s something like what you told me,” Sonny replied cautiously, drawling the words out like they tasted sour on his tongue. “Something weird. Can you come check it out and tell me what you think?”

“Sure, we’ll be there in a bit,” Dean said, and then hung up the phone, ignoring the way his hand was shaking as he turned back to his brother, a muscle in his jaw jumping. Dean slipped the phone into his back pocket, acting casual as he reached for his jacket, always resting on the same chair and said, “We gotta go.”

“Hold on,” Sam said, crossing his arms, looking at him skeptically, but also in amusement. “Who the hell is Sonny? A hunter?”

“No,” Dean said. “Come on, Sam—get your shit and let’s go.”

“Dean,” Sam said, and Dean knew what that tone meant—it meant that Sam wasn’t going to move his freakishly sized body anywhere until he had the answers that he wanted, and that was a promise. Dean turned back to him fully, his shoulders slumping slightly, and Sam’s eyes, more tired than usual, were analyzing him carefully, silently. “Are you going to tell me what is going on?”

“We have a hunt,” Dean said, but Sam was already shaking his head, knowing that even Dean knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

“We wouldn’t be taking a hunt if it wasn’t important,” Sam observed. “That, and you’re acting all flighty. I’m not letting you leave until you give me some kind of answer.”

And Dean was out of excuses. For everything. So, he told Sam one of the first whole truths he has told him in a while, and he said, “Remember when Dad was hunting that thing—I think it was a rougarou—up in New York, back when we were teens? He dropped us off at the Mountainside Inn—you know, the one with the pool table?”

A slight flicker of recognition ran over Sam’s face, and he said, “The time that Dad sent you on the hunt in the middle of it, yeah.”

Something subtle and sour crept through Dean’s chest, and he replied darkly, “Is that what Dad told you? That I went on a _hunt_?”

“Isn’t that what happened?” Sam demanded, looking shocked. “Dad came and picked me up, acting weird, and then dropped me off at Bobby’s for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or so.”

“I didn’t go on a hunt,” Dean replied, and the words felt like poison, so he spit them out like they were. “No—I was running out of money for food, so I tried to skim at pool, but I ended up losing. So I tried to lift some groceries at a local place, and got busted. Since there wasn’t an adult around that would claim me, I got sent to a boy’s home to wait out until my arraignment.”

Dean thought Sam was going to choke on air when his brother managed to cough out, “ _Boy’s home?_ ”

“Yeah, you know, for delinquents like me,” Dean replied smartly, throwing his arms up. “Dad wouldn’t come and get me, so I was stuck there for a couple of months. Sonny, the guy who just called, was in charge of the place. He found out what we do on accident, and I guess he kept my number somewhere to call just in case. He says something fishy is happening up at the home, and he needs our help.”

“So Dad just left you at this random boy’s home for months?” Sam demanded, his eyebrows raised. “And then he just—just lied to me about it for years, like it was no big deal?”

“If it makes you feel better,” Dean said, “I never went to my arraignment.”

But Dean wanted to say more, wanted to point out some of the obvious things—that the John that left Dean at the boy’s home was the exact man that they had been raised by, and Sam must have known better to think that John was anything different. John was their father, but he was a disciplinary, harsh man, and Dean still wonders to this day how he got away with it so easily. Dean kept letting himself think back to the time he had nearly forgotten about—it felt so insignificant now, after heaven and hell, but he still had it tucked in the back of his memory—and Dean wanted to put it all behind him again, to forget about it. But something in his sternum was urging him to go forward, to go to New York and find out if anything is going on and if the place still looks the same, and Dean almost couldn’t explain the urge.

Almost.

“There’s not much more to it, Sammy,” Dean assured his brother, barely able to look him in the eye anymore without waiting for the flash of Ezekiel’s blue. “Dad was mad at me, and he taught me a lesson. End of story.”

It wasn’t the end of the story, and Sam must have realized—he had to remember. He had to remember because he was only a wall away when John screamed at him that night for what he had done. The night John had picked Dean up, it had been nothing less than a nightmare, and it made Dean never want to fuck up that badly again, and he became the perfect soldier after that, because he was so affected by the way he had disappointed and angered John that he wanted it to stop happening, wanted his life to go back to the easy flow it always had been, and it had. The events in upstate New York were an insignificant blip on Dean’s radar as far as he was concerned—but Sonny had called and asked for his help this once, this being the same man that believed Dean could do something more than the business that he would inevitably fall into, and Dean couldn’t leave the man hanging. He owed him something, and he could give him this.

So he shrugged on his jacket and said, “Five minutes?”

Sam gave Dean a long, long look, as if he was attempting to remember the way Dean remembered, but Sam had been twelve at the time and would never have thought to remember something so insignificant. And Dean knew he would never admit it, but Sam still felt off after the Trials, no matter how long ago they were, and it worried Dean every time Sam stumbled or started to tip while standing straight, because it wasn’t normally for him to be struggling so badly. Sam probably wouldn’t be able to remember much about when he was twelve in the first place, but he definitely wouldn’t be able to recall the finer details when he was one angel’s vacancy away from a vegetative state.

Dean held his tongue, somehow managing to keep his face clear, but Dean just really wanted to punch something. To punch something, and for Sam to get better already.

Dean was starting to wonder if Sam was ever going to get better. If it was even possible.

Sam sighed and shrugged, grabbing his jacket as well, and he said, “Not like I have anything else to do. I’ve been in this damn bunker way too long, and there’s no one to talk to but you and Crowley, and Crowley’s been too busy pouting since his long-distance call to Abbadon.”

“That’s the spirit,” Dean remarked. “Get out of the bunker, stretch those legs, some fresh air out in the New York countryside—and we’ll actually be able to get back into the normal game for a while.”

“Normal doesn’t even feel normal anymore,” Sam said, rolling his eyes, and then turned and jogged up the stairs, disappearing into the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Dean’s smirk and façade faded as he watched his brother leave, that same terrible feeling curling into his stomach.

Dean couldn’t help but to feel like he was clinging to Sammy—not because he felt like he had to protect him, because he knew he was going to lose him. Like it was only a matter of time.

And there was nothing more in the world he hated than that feeling he gets when he can’t do anything to help Sam. 


	2. Act I, Part Two

The road to Sonny’s didn’t look familiar at all—it never changed, and Dean was well aware that farm towns like this didn’t, but no matter how many times he travelled down it, he couldn’t help but to think he might be going the wrong way. He’d stopped by only once before—a long time ago, when Sammy was at Stanford and Dean was going solo, he had stopped by to give Sonny his number for emergencies like this, pressured into it by his own gut feeling. Otherwise, Dean would have preferred to avoid this house like the plague. And, although he would have wanted nothing more than to forget about it, and although nothing around him looked right, he always managed to pull up in front of the sign for Sonny’s Home for Boys.

He and Sam had been sitting in a comfortable silence ever since they hit the state of New York, but now that they were here, he could tell Sam was practically exploding with questions. He turned the car off and stepped out, closing his door, and Sam mimicked him, looking over the car at the house.

“So Dad just left you here?” Sam demanded, his eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t seem like something he would do.”

“He was pissed, that’s all I know,” Dean replied simply, putting his hands in his pockets. “And I guess I couldn’t really blame him—he only gave me one job and I fucked it up.”

“You were sixteen, and you made one mistake,” Sam insisted. Dean’s shoulders tensed, thinking back to how mistakes always went over in their family—with screaming matches and grudges, and how Dean had always taken the blunt of the hit because he was older and because he wanted to protect Sam from it. They had lived the same childhood with the same father, and had both been on the receiving end of John Winchester’s capacity for forgiveness, but sometimes it was like Sam hadn’t even been there at all. Sure, Dean knew that his father cared about him and his brother and all, but it was no secret that John had quite the temper.

Dean spent his entire life under the same command—to take care of Sammy. And when that went wrong, his life always turned upside down and inside out, and he never forgave himself for any of it.

So no. It was a bit more than one mistake. But he wasn’t exactly looking to have a heart to heart about their long-dead dad and Dean’s precious feelings when Sam had an unknowing angelic creature in the passenger seat.

So Dean just shrugged and said, “It’s not much of a big deal now, but at the time, losing money like that was pretty bad. It was all you and I had for weeks. I can’t really blame him for letting me rot here for two weeks or whatever.”

“I can’t believe I bought Dad’s story about you going hunting,” Sam was still unable to understand, shaking his head. “I should’ve realized something was wrong when he left me with Bobby for so long—I think it’s the longest I ever stayed with one of his hunting friends.”

“Dude, stop beating yourself up about it, you were some snotty twelve year old,” Dean told his brother as they walked up the front path to Sonny’s house, rolling his eyes. “I’m surprised you even remember it at all. Look, it’s no big deal, alright? It happened, and life went on.”

But Sam still frowned like something was bothering him, and Dean realized that he was afraid to ask him what was wrong—afraid just in case Sam was annoyed because he couldn’t remember something he knew he did.

Dean felt sick. The last thing he wanted to think about was if Sam was deteriorating from the inside, and Zeke wasn’t able to fix him in time. So, in true Dean Winchester fashion, he pushed it all to the back of his mind to avoid for now and think back on in a more relevant time later, and he paid attention to nothing other than climbing the porch and knocking hard on the door, glancing back to look at Sam as they waited.

The door opened, and an elderly woman with a strict face popped her head out, frowning at them. “Can I help you boys?”

“Yeah, hi, we’re here to see Sonny,” Dean told her, giving her a smile. Her eyes narrowed, but she opened the door wide enough that they could step just over the threshold.

“You some of his prison buddies?” she demanded warily, looking from their boots to their leather jackets, her eyes finally stopping judgmentally on Sam’s sideburns. Dean bit his cheek to stop himself from laughing.

“Uh, no, no we’re not,” Dean said, glancing around at the front entryway, his stomach dipping when the unchanged familiarity of the room clawed at him from the inside. “He should be expecting us.”

“I’ll go find him,” she told them slowly when she was sure they weren’t going to give up and leave, her voice sounding almost annoyed. “Stay here, and take off those roach stompers—I just broke my back cleaning this floor.”

She scuttled away, probably muttering something about hooligans under her breath, and Dean turned back to look at Sam with a flat expression, only to find his brother giving him the same look. He laughed, smirking as he unlaced the tops of his boots, letting them fall onto the ground next to the door as he shook his head.

“She was really hating your hippie haircut, Sammy,” he teased his little brother, grinning. “I could see it in her beady, judgmental eyes.”

“You look like a convict too, jerk,” he muttered with a roll of his eyes, kicking off his boots next to Dean’s. “I didn’t realize Sonny was an ex-con.”

“Who else would want to help out a shit load of troubled kids?” Dean replied, shrugging. “He’s one of those guys that came out of the pen and never wanted to go near it again. He’s a good guy.”

For some reason, Sam was just more amused than he was anything else, and he followed behind Dean without comment as he wandered into the living room, glancing around. The furniture was in different places, allowing for more room to move, but it was all the same furniture since back when Dean was there—he stared at the couch, the only piece of furniture in the same spot, and he couldn’t help but to remember—

 

_“This him?” Sonny demanded, nodding toward where Dean was sitting on the couch, his handcuffed wrists resting on his knees, his head ducked and his shoulders bowed. “This is the one you were tellin’ me about?”_

_“This is him,” the deputy drawled, waving in his direction like Dean was nothing but a bad smell. “Normally I wouldn’t ask you for this, Sonny, but the judge just went on vacation with his wife, and we can’t keep him in County for that long till his arraignment, not when he’s sixteen.”_

_“It’s not a problem at all,” Sonny replied simply, looking down at Dean like he was studying him, and Dean stared harder at his hands, wishing they would just all stop talking about him like he wasn’t even there. “What’d he do?”_

_“Steven Hewitt caught him red-handed down at the store,” the deputy snorted, like Dean was a fucking idiot for getting caught by that old geezer. “And get this—all he was takin’ was peanut butter and bread. He probably would have ran if Hewitt didn’t keep a shotgun under the counter.”_

_Sonny glanced back at Dean, considering him, and Dean tried to pretend harder like he couldn’t hear them. “So, what, he got nowhere else to stay? No family or nothing?”_

_“We got in touch with his old man, but he wouldn’t come pick him up. He said to let him rot behind bars.” At that, Dean snorted loudly, rolling his eyes—he hadn’t been able to speak to John directly since the deputy had it in for him, but he had expected John’s reaction to have been to that effect—but, really, Dean felt sick to his stomach, worrying about if Sam was okay and what his dad was going to do when he realized he was eventually going to have to pick Dean up from this place. Dean ducked his head further away, hoping the asshole deputy wouldn’t spot how much the news of his father’s anger bothered him—the guilt was strong, and he knew he was going to get it bad when he next saw his dad. The deputy shot him a glare, like his laughter was interrupting his monologue, before turning back to Sonny. “So, for now, you’re the only option we’ve got.”_

_“I’ll take him, no problem,” Sonny assured the cop, shrugging. The deputy breathed out, taking off the sunglasses he had been wearing the entire time like the douchebag he was._

_“Thanks for this, Sonny,” he told the man, glancing back at Dean. “This one’s been a pain in my ass since I picked him up.”_

_“Where’d you get the shiner?” Sonny asked, but Dean heard him holding back a laugh; Sonny damn well knew how the deputy got clocked. Dean couldn’t help but to laugh, smirking._

_“The little shit sucker punched me,” the deputy growled, shooting Dean a lot of pure acid that only made his smirk wider. Dean grinned mockingly up at the officer, innocently widening his eyes._

_“It’s not my fault you’re a little slow on the uptake,” Dean replied smartly, his face making him seem like an angel of innocence. The deputy’s uninjured eye twitched, and he turned away from Dean, a snarl curled at the edge of his mouth._

_“He’s a bit of a handful,” the deputy stated lamely for Sonny before reaching his hand out, and Sonny shook it. “I gotta get out of here, Sonny, but I’ll stop back when the judge is ready to see him.”_

_“Sounds alright,” Sonny said, following the deputy to the front door. The two older men glanced back reflexively at Dean from the entryway—Dean smirked the same mocking smirk at the deputy and wiggled his fingers in a sarcastic wave, half tempted to blow the man a kiss. Sonny ushered the deputy out the door with mutterings of taking care of it before shutting the door firmly and crossing back into the living room to stand in front of Dean again, his hands in his pocket. “It’s not smart, makin’ him mad.”_

_“Why, because he’s a cop?” Dean demanded, scoffing._

_“No,” Sonny said. “Because, when you make him mad, he’ll leave with the key to the cuffs.”_

_The sound of the deputy’s sedan speeding away was loud through the open windows of the old wooden house, but Dean didn’t let a thing show on his face that he didn’t want Sonny to see. He just smirked again, showing his amusement at having been able to get under the deputy’s skin so easily. Sonny shook his head, trying not to laugh like he knew exactly when Dean was thinking._

_Sonny sank down on the sofa beside Dean, pulling out a paperclip from his pocket. “Don’t tell anyone I’m about to show you this,” he cautioned._

_“Don’t worry about it,” Dean said and lifted his hands up, letting the already-open cuffs clatter onto the carpet. He held up his freed hands, wiggling his fingers. “Picked the lock when you two wouldn’t shut up about my life story.”_

_The amused smile Sonny had been holding back for the last several minutes grew on his face, his eyes shining with a sudden new appreciation for the smart-ass kid on his couch. “Now where’d you learn to do that?”_

_“My dad’s a military man,” Dean replied, smirking simply. “I know how to do a lot of things.”_

_Sonny nodded. “Did the deputy do that to your arms?”_

_Dean looked down, surprised to remember the bruises and cuts on his arms, and his mask went right back up on his face as he went straight back into the cocky kid he was, and he looked straight into Sonny’s eyes and said, “It was a werewolf, actually.”_

_Sonny rolled his eyes, just thinking he was being an asshole, and he was—Dean hadn’t ever personally seen a werewolf, though his dad had told him enough stories about them to know that they wouldn’t leave bruises—they would’ve probably clawed up his arms to shreds. “So who was it, then?” Sonny continued, persistent, and Dean internally rolled his eyes. “Your old man?”_

_Dean spread his arms wide and said mystically, “The world may never know.”_

_Dean didn’t want to tell this guy more than he had to—he didn’t want to tell him that the bruises were from the guys who he had played in pool and tried to hustle, only to lose. He didn’t want to tell his strange guy with a terrible mustache that he had tried to corner the hustlers behind the pool hall after, only to get thrown around like a rag doll a bit before they gave up on him, laughing as they walked away, and Dean had panicked and headed straight for the shop, terrified of telling his dad that he was out of money and food. He didn’t have to tell Sonny that the only thing he had been worried about when he had been caught was Sammy, and if he was going to freak out when Dean didn’t return from his pool run._

_Dean didn’t want to tell Sonny a damn thing, and Sonny seemed to realize that pretty quickly, because he shrugged and dropped the subject, leaning back into the couch. “You hungry, kid?”_

_“Nope,” Dean said, looking up at him with a frown. “Why?”_

_“Well, you were stealing groceries—usually that means you’re hungry.”_

_Dean’s stomach flipped again, hoping that John at least came back and picked up Sammy and got him something to eat. Dean shrugged. “Nope, not me.”_

_Sonny nodded slowly, like he understood. Dean glanced around at the living room area, picking up on all the little details most people would have missed._

_“So what exactly is this place?” he demanded. “I’ve heard of boys homes, but I thought they got rid of those.”_

_“Nope,” Sonny said, popping the ‘p’. “Boys like you work on the land, learn a little bit about discipline and responsibility. It keeps you all from getting back into trouble, and gives you a little experience for life. Beats jail any day of the week.”_

_It sounded like he was quoting a brochure—Dean couldn’t help but to choke on a laugh. “I hope you know how lame you sound.”_

_“I hope you know you ain’t foolin’ anyone with that sarcasm of yours,” Sonny countered, heaving himself from the couch. “Now come on—I’ll get you something to eat and show you around the place. Lord knows you’ll have plenty of sarcastic things to say about every room in the house, and I’m dying to hear them. But first, how about some legal bread and peanut butter?”_

“Dean,” Sonny’s voice in real time shocked Dean out of his thoughts, and he turned around to see the man of the hour grinning at him, barely even having aged a day, as he walked into the room, and Dean couldn’t help but to grin back and return the embrace Sonny offered him. “Thanks for coming all the way out here on short notice—I know it’s a strange set of circumstances.”

“We are professionals at strange,” Dean assured him, gesturing toward his brother. “This is my little brother Sammy; Sammy, this is Sonny.”

“Sam, right,” Sonny said with a grin as they shook hands. “Dean told me a lot about you back in the day.”

Sam seemed surprised, but recovered enough to roll his eyes.

“So Sonny, the farms, uh, looking good,” Dean said to change the subject, barely managing not to make a face. Sonny, a man the size of a bear and with the ferocity of one, tilted his head back and laughed loudly.

“Not quite—barely standing anymore,” the man responded, glancing around at the walls like he was expecting to find holes. “Only got a handful of boys living here now—nowadays, people would rather incarcerate kids instead of redeem them.”

“Hey, Sonny,” Sam suddenly said, his eyes glancing behind the man. “Mind if we, uh, talk alone?”

Sonny and Dean glanced back—the elderly woman was wiping down a table distractedly, obviously eavesdropping on their conversation. Sonny sent the brothers an amused grin before turning back around and going, “Ruth—you mind stepping out to check on the boys for me, make sure they’re gettin’ all their morning chores done?”

She sent him an exasperated look before huffing, setting down the rag before shuffling out the backdoor, once again murmuring about something under her breath. The three men watched her go, turning back to face each other only when the back door clattered shut behind her.

“She’s a bit on the nosy side, but helps keep the boys in line, so I keep her around,” Sonny informed them, shrugging. “I assume you want to ask about what happened.”

“Tell us everything,” Dean told him, “no matter how many shades of bat-shit crazy it sounds. Lay it on us.”

“Remember Jack?” Sonny asked Dean.

“Yeah—he was a mean old son of a bitch,” Dean recalled. “What I wouldn’t have given to see that guy get what’s coming to him.”

“Well, apparently someone thought the same way, because we found him dead out in the barn a few days ago,” Sonny told Dean, hooking his hands in his belt loops. “Somehow that ancient, rusty tractor that hasn’t worked in decades roared to life and impaled the guy.”

“Damn,” Dean said.

“Maybe it slipped out of park?” Sam offered weakly, grimacing.

Sonny shook his head before saying, “Look, I never believed in all of this mumbo-jumbo you two claim to know stuff about, but even I can’t deny weird shit has been happenin’ around this house—scratching in the walls and flickering lights and what have you.”

Dean glanced back at Sam and they exchanged a look before he turned back to Sonny. “Could you possibly gather up the boys and get them out of the way while we take a look around?”

“Sure thing,” Sonny said, gesturing. “Take as long as you need—I would like to know what the hell is going on around here as much as the deputies do. I don’t need them accusing one of the boys and sending them off to jail for this.”

Dean nodded, and then looked at Sam. “You take the house, and I’ll go check out the barn. Let me know if you find anything fun.”

“Sure,” Sam said, and the three men went their separate ways.

*

When he was sure Sonny had rounded up all the boys and was elsewhere, Sam Winchester pulled his old, now barely-used EMF detector out of his pocket, flipping the switch on and watching the gages skyrocket. He paced the first floor, frowning as he kept getting the same readings, and got on a chair to inspect the wiring in the light fixture, cursing when he found exposed wires. He snapped the EMF off with a sigh, shoving it into his pocket—the readings all over the house would be fucked if wires were poking out all over the place, so it wasn’t even worth bothering.

But still, Sam paced around the ground floor, checking for sulfur or at least the smell of it, moving to the stairs when he checked everywhere and came up short. He walked slowly up the stairs, glancing around—he was having a hard time picturing Dean here as he remembered him at that age, barely able to believe that Dean didn’t just crawl out the window and make a run for it the first chance he got. He stopped when he got to the top of the stairs, looking up at the wall suddenly filled with frames and ribbons.

An entire wall was covered with certificates and ribbons and medals—a bunch of kids, from before Dean’s time here and after, were represented for a variety of different things, whether it be winning an award on the wrestling team or making Honor Roll at school. Sam looked for Dean’s name, but he had nothing on the wall. Like everywhere he always seemed to go in their life, Dean was a ghost.

Sam walked through the main bedrooms on the floor, coming up empty once more, before he edged open the door at the end of the hall, the only door on that side of the hall at all, and looked inside of it.

It was filled with small twin beds, probably about eight of them, and a door sat to his immediate left, into the rest of the space left on the second floor. Sam looked around at the low beds, only half of them made, before he caught the glint of something and froze, looking down at one of the footboards, the tape in the center reading one name: Timmy.

Sam bent down next to it and ran his hand over the post, his fingers catching on the carvings that had caught his eye—they weren’t well done, but they were John Winchester 101 protection symbols, and Sam let out a long breath through his nose as he looked at them, imagining Dean alone in a bed with a bunch of strange kids, sixteen and paranoid about the monsters that only he knew existed.

Dean had always been so put together when they were kids, always looking after him and acting like an adult, and it was sometimes hard for Sam to realize that Dean had been just that—a kid.

Sam patted the bedpost before rising back to his full height, glancing around.

A scuffling sound, like scratching, came from the opposite wall, and Sam’s head snapped around to look at it. He froze, not even breathing, and he heard it again, this time fainter but still loud enough. He reached behind him into his waistband and pulled out a silver knife, starting slowly and silently to the door he had spotted earlier, nearly kicking himself for not checking it first. He raised the knife up to a defensive position as he hesitated outside the door, listening for more noise, and he threw it open the moment he heard the sound again.

He definitely didn’t expect what he saw—and the elderly Ruth holding a rosary, praying by her bedside, probably didn’t expect him, either. 


	3. Act I, Part Three

“Shit!” Sam cursed, and then wanted to punch himself in the face. “Ah, no, I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were up here—I, uh, I think I, uh—” He raised his knife, shrugging lamely with a breathy laugh, and he tucked it away, wincing at his own painful attempt at acting cool.

Ruth stood up suddenly from where she had been kneeling beside her bed, a rosary clutched hard in her hand as she held it cautiously in front of her, like she was convinced Sam was possessed by the devil—which wasn’t entirely inaccurate, all things considered. “Why do you have a knife?” she demanded, her eyes wide, and Sam scrambled for an excuse that sounded plausible.

“Uh,” he said.

“You’re here looking for something, aren’t you?” she demanded, his eyes suddenly far away, and she shuddered. “I can’t imagine why your brother would return here of all places if it was anything else, but I don’t understand what he could possibly be looking for.”

“It’s, um, hard to explain,” Sam explained to her, holding his hands out still in caution, trying to show her that he wasn’t holding a knife anymore. And her hands with the rosary were dropping, like she was coming to realize that it could only protect her so much. “You’re praying?”

“Yes,” she said, suddenly flustered, and she glanced down at the rosary like she was surprised to see she was holding it—Sam could see a cross hanging on the wall above the bed that must be hers, as well as embroidered scriptures hanging on the walls, and he somehow wasn’t surprised that the hard-ass old maid was so devoted to faith. “Yes, I was praying. This house . . . It doesn’t feel safe to be here anymore.”

“How so?” Sam asked, but Ruth looked away sharply, toward a window. He took a cautious step forward, looking at her kindly when her head snapped back to look at him, and he wondered how she seemed so calm when being confronted with a man holding a knife and he felt a little sick. “Ruth—Sonny called Dean and I to help you all here. If you know something that could help us, you need to say so.”

“It’s nothing that makes sense,” she said.

“That’s our specialty.”

She hesitated—weighing whether she was going to sound like a typical godly old lady or just a complete crazy person—before she admitted, “This house feels dark, and I believe that some evil has befallen us.”

“Something demonic?” Sam asked, paying even more attention. Had she seen something?

But Ruth was shrugging, staring down at the rosary she was nervously twisting around her fingers, chewing on her lip. She said, “I don’t know what it is—but I feel it, in every corner of this house. It’s not . . . It’s not welcoming. It’s dark and it scares me, and I want it to leave.”

“We can help you, Ruth,” Sam pleaded with her. “Is that what you were praying for? For it to be gone?”

She nodded weakly.

“Okay. Well, Dean and I can help, and we’re going to find what’s been going on in this house, all right? But we need your help, too—is there anything about this house that you might know about that could cause this dark feeling?”

She looked up at him and said, “Nothing but a ghost story. Why?”

Sam tried not to grin as he asked calmly, “Ghost story?”

*

“Alright, Casper,” Dean muttered as he watched the EMF detector go wild, gazing around the old and rusty barn, “come out, come out, you salt-fearing piece of shit.”

Dean moved cautiously into the barn, glancing around at the structure—it looked like a good wind would knock the haphazard shelter to the ground, burying Dean Wicked-Witch-style underneath (the reference made Dean think of Charlie, and he wondered how her adventures were going). Dean spotted the old rusty tractor that had been there since before he had been alive and would probably be there until long after, and he took a good look at it—the blood had thankfully been washed away from the equipment, same as it had been from the floor of the barn, and he grimaced at the spikes on the front and couldn’t help but to think that karma was about just as much of a bitch back to Jack as Jack had been to life. Dean waved the EMF detector in front of the tractor, but it was no use—the thing had been howling and screeching since the moment he walked in at top level, and it wasn’t about to change anytime soon. Dean turned it off and tucked it back into his jacket pocket, before he heard the sound of rustling from the other side of the building, off to where there were closet-sized rooms were. He straightened up, reaching automatically for a crowbar tossed to the barnyard floor, hoping it was made of the right material.

“Hello?” Dean called, eyes narrowed. “Anyone in here?”

Another rustle, but Dean knew that kind of rustle—it was a human kind.

He softly left the crowbar back down, letting out a breath. “You’re not in trouble, alright—I just thought Sonny asked you all to keep clear.”

A head popped out of one of the closets, a head with big eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses that seemed almost too big for his face. The head belonged to a young boy—probably around the age of eight or nine—who was wearing a superhero t-shirt and a cape made out of what looked like a bed sheet. He edged sheepishly closer to Dean, looking away like he was expecting Dean to yell at him.

Dean crouched down, smiling. “Hey there, it’s alright—I’m not here to get you into trouble.”

The kid looked up at him, still grimacing, still not coming much closer. Dean put his elbows onto his knees, raising his eyebrows while smiling at the kid, memories of Sam just as geeky at that age popping into his mind, which only made him smile wider.

“What are you doing out here, kid?” Dean demanded, looking the gangly kid up and down, and the kid stared down at his feet, taking a deep breath, before he looked at Dean cautiously.

“I’m hunting monsters,” he told Dean, and Dean couldn’t help it—the smile almost hurt his face, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled so wide.

“Yeah?” he asked. “And why is that?”

The kid shrugged and said, “Someone has to.”

Dean burst out laughing, throwing his head back. He shook his head, incredulous, before grinning at the kid. “Don’t you think capes are a little impractical for fighting monsters?” Dean teased him.

The kid returned his teasing with a flat, anything-but-amused look that almost made Dean laugh again before telling him, “Superman had a cape. They’re necessary.”

“You make a good point there, bud, I’ll tell you that,” Dean said, before holding out his hand. “I’m Dean.”

“Timmy,” the boy said, taking Dean’s hand and shaking it weakly before dropping it. Dean gave him a soft judgmental look.

“Oh, no,” Dean said. “I can’t go around letting you shake hands like that. Come on, let’s try this again. If you’re gonna shake hands, Tim, you gotta shake them like the grown-up you can be, alright?” Timmy flushed a little, pleased that Dean wasn’t treating him like a child, and nodded, giving Dean his hand again. “Okay, so give me your best Kung Fu grip—awesome. Now look me straight in the eye, show me you mean business, and shake as hard as you can. There we go—that’s it. You shake like that, Timmy, and you’ll be alright.”

Timmy smiled up at Dean when their hands fell apart, looking bigger and taller than he had a couple of seconds ago, and Dean saw Sam in him so much that he nearly checked to make sure he was still the same age, that he didn’t step back into time.

“Hey, Timmy, I’ve got a question for you,” Dean said, leaning closer. “Do you know Jack, who worked here?”

The smile suddenly dropped from Timmy’s face and he nodded. Dean understood that expression well.

“He yelled a lot,” Timmy told him.

“That he did,” Dean replied, wondering how often tiny, nerdy Timmy was one of the kids the mean old bastard had yelled at. “But Timmy—do you know anything about what happened to him?”

“I-I was there,” Timmy whispered, looking away.

Dean stared at him, shocked. “You were _there_?”

“Me and some of the others were playing,” Timmy explained to Dean, looking him in the eye earnestly to show him he was being honest.

“Did you see anything?”

Timmy shook his head. “We heard him yelling at us, and then he wasn’t yelling anymore.”

 _Jesus_ , Dean thought.

“Do you remember anything from that night, anything that could be important?” Dean asked the boy. “It doesn’t have to be something that seems important—just something weird?”

Timmy got this weird look on his face before he admitted, “It . . . It suddenly got really cold.”

Dean nodded, but it wasn’t anything more than what he already knew—but he had a feeling that this was the best kind of witness he was going to get for this one, so it was good to hear the reinforcement for himself. Timmy started fidgeting, like he was suddenly skittish about something.

“Can I go now?” Timmy asked him anxiously, his eyes looking behind Dean. “I have chores to do, and I don’t want Miss Ruth to get mad at me.”

“That Ruth is quite the stickler, huh?” Dean muttered to himself before he said, “You go right ahead, Timmy. Thanks, bud.”

Timmy offered him a smile before he timidly told Dean, “Thanks for teaching me how to shake hands like a grown-up.”

And, before Dean could say anything else, Timmy was running out of the barn, cape flapping behind him, and Dean couldn’t help but to grin at the boy’s back as he rushed toward the house.

 _Just like Sammy_ , Dean thought, and then rolled his eyes.

*

“Back when I was a girl, the Wasserlaufs owned this farm,” Ruth explained to Sam. “My parents used to take me and my siblings up here to the farm to run around—Doreen, the woman of the house, was the nicest thing, always let my siblings and I do whatever we want, always was kind to us. But her husband Howard—well, he wasn’t the nicest guy. He liked to drink, Howard did, and one day he got it into his head that Doreen was rolling in the hay with one of the farm boys, and he killed them both here, in that barn over there. Meat cleaver, I heard, God help their poor souls. Howard got a lifetime in prison for it, which ended for him about a year ago.

“The boys like to tell this story—makes me a little mad when I hear it, but I don’t know what to think anymore. Legend has it, they say, that Howard Wasserlauf’s still walking around this farm, lookin’ for the man who his wife loved more than him. I never thought anything of the story until Jack died and I-I remembered how he was a farmboy, back in the days of the Wasserlaufs—”

Ruth shivered. “But it’s just another one of those ghost stories, and I don’t know why it’s bothering me so much.”

“Have you noticed anything weird happening around the house?” Sam asked her. “Lights flickering, doors opening and closing?”

“Don’t tell me that you believe the stories, too,” she said with a hefty sigh, but she still answered the question. “The house is filled with faulty wiring, and some of the boys are uncontrollable. I can’t call most of the things that happen around here mysterious in origin.”

Sam nodded, and then said, “I have one more question.”

She looked at him, waiting.

“Ruth—is Howard buried in town?”

Ruth looked like she was considering giving him an exorcism again—but she told him yes.

*  
“Why didn’t Dad want to tell me?” Sam asked out loud for not the first time, and Dean sighed to himself, digging the shovel hard into the soil of yet another grave—as his back ached, Dean remembered how much he didn’t miss the salt-and-burn cases. “I mean, it’s not like it was a big deal. Matter of fact, why didn’t _you_ just tell me?”

“Never came up,” Dean said, heaving another shovel filled with dirt over his shoulder out of the grave. “Look, Sam, like you said, it wasn’t much of a big deal—nothing happened here that was noteworthy, and Dad was so angry at me for fucking up that I kept my mouth shut about it. It was less of a secret and more of an elephant in the room.”

“Was this place all that bad?” Sam asked, digging, not looking at Dean, but Dean wished he was so he could see what look was on Sam’s face.

Dean cleared his throat and said, “Wasn’t quite fighting monsters, but it wasn’t that bad. But if another month would have gone by, I probably would have been climbing up the walls.”

Sam laughed a little, and Dean brought down his shovel again, only to hit something hard. “Jackpot,” he muttered as he and Sam cleared off most of the rest of the dirt from the top of the grave, prying open the top and looking down at the skeleton before them. Sam and Dean threw salt over the bones until it was mostly covered before heaving themselves out of the grave and adding gas to the mix, and Dean lit a flame from a match before throwing it in, and the bones caught flame. He glanced at Sam, tucking the matchbook back into his jacket.

“Let’s not stick around and watch Old MacDonald burn, huh?” Dean asked. “I’ve met the police in this town, and from what I remember, they were total assmonkeys.”

“Fair enough,” Sam said, not asking a million questions, and grabbed the shovels, throwing them into the trunk of the Impala. Dean roared the engine as Sam flopped in, rubbing his face.

“You alright?” Dean asked nervously.

“Tired,” Sam replied.

“Well, the motel is five minutes out,” Dean said. “Don’t drool on my window.”

Sam laughed and rolled his eyes, leaning back as they rolled out of the cemetery, neither of them looking back to watch the old farmer’s body burn.

*

Ave Maria played loudly from the bathroom upstairs as Ruth relaxed into the warm water of the bathtub, taking a deep, soothing breath after a long and laborious day. The strangest day—she hadn’t expected to tell a ghost story to a shaggy-haired young man with a knife who looked about ready to pass out at any second, and she certainly hadn’t imagined how honestly he took the story. She leaned back against the edge of the tub, glancing to the side to see her rosary dangling from the sink, and she let her eyes slide shut and let her body relax a little more, forgetting about the odd strangers to visit the home today, forgetting about the bad-talking young boys who lived here that would hopefully soon learn their lesson. She pretended like none of it had happened, listening to the radio and nothing else.

She never would have expected the cold until it washed over her, and she opened her eyes in surprise and found the fog of her breath lingering in the air before her face, her fingers shaking with the sudden chill.

She opened her mouth like she was going to ask a question, or maybe scream, but the clear shower curtain suddenly crashed down on top of her, making her cry out loudly, her fingers reaching up to lift it off, panicking and screaming louder when it wouldn’t move, like it was being pressed down. She felt cold, and she felt fear, and she felt that darkness she had prayed about today lingering over her, like that was what was holding the plastic against her nose and mouth, pressing her deeper into the water.

“Help!” she screamed over the music, clawing and flailing frantically, shrieking, “ _Help_!”

“Ruth?” she heard Sonny yelling back from the door. “Ruth, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“ _Help_!” she screamed again, losing her breath, fighting desperately.

“ _Ruth_!” Sonny yelled, trying to open the door and failing—the knob wouldn’t turn, not like it was locked, but like someone was holding it tightly from the inside to keep him from coming in. “Ruth, open up! Ruth? _Ruth_!”

A splash, and then nothing, the radio feeling louder in Sonny’s ears as he screamed, “ _Ruth_!”

Nothing but _Ave Maria, Ave Maria_ , and a horrible silence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, and I hope that most of you all (like me) are preparing yourselves emotionally for the Sherlock season three premiere in only a few days.


	4. Act II, Part One

“Let’s just get out of town,” Sammy whined again from his spot across the table from Dean, pouting at him. “The job is over, and we should get back to the bunker and make sure everything is alright.”

“You spend all your time in that bunker,” Dean snorted, rolling his eyes. “Just relax, will you? I’m hungry, and it’s either stop here or listen to me complain for another couple of hours until we find another burger joint.”

Sam muttered something under his breath before taking a long sip of his water. Dean leaned back into the wooden chair, glancing around.

Old towns like this never changed, and the places in the town were usually on the same wavelength—Cus’s Place was still the same as he remembered it from the all of one time he had been here, and he remembered the burger was good so there was nothing wrong with stopping in again.

Dean had been in a lot of places all over the country, a lot of small towns, and usually he forgot the minutiae about them the minute that they hit the city limit, but being back here, in a place he had purposefully forced himself to forget, was making all of these memories come back, and he remembered being in here as clearly as a grown man could remember being sixteen—mostly, but only because being at Sonny’s had been one of his biggest life embarrassments, and it always seemed impossible to forget embarrassing things.

Dean took a sip of his root beer, and then was almost surprised to see it in his hand. He was noticeably more stringent on his alcohol intake as of late—realized that it probably wouldn’t do much good if they ran into a mean-ass fallen angel if he was smashed—but it was still a shock to him when he realized that he didn’t have a beer in his hand, when he looked down and it was a can of A&W instead of a bottle of Budweiser.

Dean realized what he ordered too late, and he put it down on the table, pressing his tongue into his cheek.

He must have some more subconscious tells than he thought he did, because he was pretty sure that the last time he had been in this restaurant, the only other time, he had gotten a root beer then as well.

He was ripped from his realization by the sudden apparition of their waitress beside him at the table. “Sorry about that,” she told them in a chipper voice that for some reason made Dean’s blood run cold. “The place is getting a little busy—what can I get you boys?”

Sam ordered a plate of banana pancakes, and then looked at Dean. But Dean didn’t say anything for a moment. He was staring at the waitress, his breath caught in his chest, his eyes widening incredulously as he looked between the familiar features of her face and that smile and the name on the tag on her apron.

_Robin._

He suddenly couldn’t breathe, and he looked her in the eye—

And there was nothing. No recognition, no nothing. And he deflated again, a soft uncomfortable feeling in his chest, before he told her his order slowly, letting nothing show on his face.

She smiled at them kindly—the way people smile at strangers—and told them that she would be back with their orders shortly, and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Dean watched her, curious, and looked back at Sam when she had disappeared.

“Dude, seriously, what is your deal?” Sam demanded, looking like he was torn between shaking Dean and laughing. “Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m fine,” Dean told him, shaking his head. “I was just . . . a little surprised.”

“Did you know her or something?” Sam asked, looking back at the kitchen area where Robin had disappeared, his eyes now curious again. “When you saw her, you looked like you’d seen the ghost of Christmas past or something.”

“I knew her,” Dean relented, but didn’t go into it further.

Sam raised his eyebrows, challenging him to continue, but Dean didn’t want to budge. He glanced down at the table before ripping up his napkin, his brow furrowed as he thought, remembering back to when he sat at a table on the other side of the room, the man across from his much different than his brother, and he remembered it well.

 

_Dean was squirming in his seat. He didn’t like the feeling of abandonment creeping over his chest, didn’t like the way Sonny always looked at him like he felt sorry for him. It was eating at Dean, being here on this goddamn ranch, being tossed around like a fucking slave because that was considered him “learning his lesson”. He tore anxiously at the napkin in front of him as he sat across from Sonny, fidgeting._

_“You didn’t need to take me here, you know,” Dean muttered uncomfortably to the man across from him. Sonny had heard him say it to him one too many times since they had gotten here, and he sighed impatiently, narrowing his eyes at him._

_“I do this for all the boys after they’ve been here for two weeks,” Sonny explained to Dean, leaning back into the chair comfortably, taking up all of the possible space on it and around it, and it felt like Dean was sitting across the table from a bull ready to charge. “The two week mark is when they start getting fidgety, like you are over there. Drives me crazy. You all start realizing that this place isn’t where you want to be, and you start to want out.”_

_“It’s not_ bad _,” Dean relented, knowing he would probably be doing just as much physical labor if he was on a hunt with his father, or if he was running around making sure Sam’s life wasn’t crashing down around him. Dean shrugged, his heart panging when he thought of his baby brother. “It’s just . . . not home.”_

_He said it like he had a home. He said it like he had something to look forward to, when he got back._

_But he did, even if it wasn’t a classic apple-pie life. He had a lot to look forward to—getting back on the road, seeing new places, falling back into a routine with Sam, hunting with his dad and trying to make up for this mistake of his. His life might not have been normal, but it was the only one he knew and the only one he had, and it wasn’t so bad._

_Sonny’s and his dad’s were two different lives, and Dean only was climbing up the walls at Sonny’s because someone’s constant presence was missing. If Sam had been here with him, he probably wouldn’t be thinking much about how much he wanted to get out of here._

_Dean cleared his throat and said, “Thanks.”_

_“No problem, Dean. Just following tradition.”_

_“Not just for the meal,” Dean told him, clearing his throat nervously. “For, uh, for getting the charges dropped. I . . . I really appreciate it.”_

_“There shouldn’t be a crime for being hungry and desperate,” Sonny told Dean softly, a small pitying smile on his face that hit at Dean like a leather belt, and he had to look away.  “But, still, stealing_ is _a crime, and I know you know that, but I’m sure that you’ve learned your lesson well enough. There shouldn’t be a reason that they kept the charges, really—you’re a minor who’s never been in trouble before, no record, and you’re doing well in school and doing more than the work expected for you to be doing on the farm. The deputy was just being an ass, and the guy who owns the shop is crazier than anyone I ever met.”_

_Dean smiled a little, still awkward and embarrassed. He wasn’t used to strangers showing him kindness—he was usually the one working to save people, not having people work to do the same for him. It didn’t fit right in his skin._

_They sat in silence for a few moments, not an uncomfortable one, before Sonny cleared his throat and leaning forward, making a face like he didn’t want to talk about it but he had to. “Dean, you know you can be honest with me, right? Well, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to know that you’re not in trouble and I won’t be mad or judge you or anything, but . . . Are you into all of that heavy-metal, devil-worship stuff?”_

_Dean nearly choked on air. “What? No.”_

_“I’m not, ah, judging you, Dean, I just—I found some occult-looking symbols carved onto your bed. I was wondering.”_

_Dean winced. “No, no, it’s not—it’s not_ devil worship _. But it’s a . . . it’s a long story.”_

_“Does that story include why I always find salt at the bunk room door every morning?”_

_He probably should have realized that he wasn’t exactly being too sneaky about these things—he watched for how some of the boys handled objects made of silver, and he had the warding carved onto his bed because he figured more people would notice if he had them all around the room in chalk like normal, and he couldn’t help but to have the line of salt on the doorways and the windows, the way his dad had been teaching him to do since before he could spell “over-protective pain in the ass”. It was a habit, and a precaution, and just thinking about how he would possibly explain it to Sonny made him grimace._

_“It’s superstition,” Dean told Sonny easily, and it was only a healthy half-lie. “It’s a family thing.”_

_“You’re pretty blindly loyal to your family, aren’t you?” Sonny asked._

_Dean shrugged. “I guess.”_

_Sonny looked at him straight and said carefully, “The same family that abandoned you here.”_

_Dean flinched back like Sonny had hit him, looking away. He was sitting in the middle of a restaurant filled with amazing smells of homemade meals and fried meat, but he suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore. His hands gripped the tattered remains of his napkin, gripping onto it like it would keep him rooted to the spot._

_Sonny watched his reaction carefully, sadly. He sighed and leaned forward, looking at Dean steadily._

_“I’m not saying family is always a bad thing, Dean,” Sonny explained to him. “Just, sometimes, family makes you forget what is really important, okay? Family is important, but just—okay. I was part of this gang back when I was only a little older than you, right? They were my family. I lived, I breathed, and I would have died for them in a heartbeat. You know where it got me? Fifteen years incarcerated in a correctional facility. I was completely loyal to something that didn’t deserve all of that loyalty, and it got me thrown in jail. I should have been more loyal to myself than I ever was to a group of guys, no matter how much I cared about him. I’m not saying loyalty is a bad thing, Dean, so don’t give me that look—what I’m saying is that, sometimes, you have to be careful how much of your loyalty you dedicate to someone that could let you down. You only get one shot in this game, Dean, and when you look in the mirror, you want the guy looking back at you to be your own man.”_

_Dean was so mad. He knew Sonny was trying to be nice, to be kind and helpful, but it just made him mad. Sonny didn’t know anything about Dean’s life, and it made him mad that he assumed he could tell. He thought that loyalty, because of one bad situation, wasn’t a good thing, but Dean had lived his life learning time and time again that your loyalty in someone might be tricky—they might let you down, like Sonny’s had, or they might make you stronger—but it made him mad that Sonny would just assume his home life to be so toxic. It upset him that Sonny believe that Dean’s loyalty in his father was something he shouldn’t be proud of when it was the only thing that Dean had going for him._

_Dean leaned forward, trying to bury that anger down, trying to control it. He knew Sonny must have seen it in his eyes because Sonny leaned away, breathing out heavily in what was almost a sigh._

_“I understand why you believe that,” Dean began softly, “and I respect that you are trying to help me. I know how loyalty can be, and I know what you’re saying. But there is nothing else in the world I should ever be more loyal to than my family. My dad raised me alone after my mother died when my brother and me were too young to even fully understand what had happened—my dad, although not always being the best father, always did what he could. He did what he had to do to take care of us and do what he does best—helping people. I’m loyal to that. I’m loyal to my younger brother because I took care of him—I took care of him from the moment I was four and I ran with my six-month-old baby brother out of the fire that killed our mom. I’m loyal to him, no matter what he could ever do, because he is a great kid and he_ deserves _my loyalty, and I know he would walk through hell and back for me. Loyalty isn’t always the way you say it is—I’m loyal to my dad, sure, even after he left me here for a while, because I can overlook his faults, and I know he has a bit of a temper. But he’s a hero to me—he and my brother are my biggest heroes—and there is no reason why I shouldn’t be loyal to them, because they would die for me the same as I would for them. I know a thing or two about loyalty, Sonny, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but loyalty isn’t always about being loyal only to yourself; sometimes, your loyalty in others, and their loyalty in you, makes you stronger, makes you better. That’s what loyalty means.”_

_Sonny stared at him, not saying anything, and he nodded slowly, soberly. Dean had a feeling he had just given him a wrong answer, but he couldn’t bring himself to care—he finished off his root beer and took a deep breath, calming his nerves, before he said: “If it’s loyalty to my family that kills me, Sonny, then I don’t think it would be a terrible way to go.”_

_“And do you expect it to kill you?” Sonny demanded, sounding a little shaken as he stared at Dean, surprised. Dean shrugged lazily and let a smirk cover his face._

_“Who knows?” he drawled sarcastically, shrugging. “Only time will tell.”_

_But Dean knew. He always knew, deep down in his gut, that he would go out fighting, and he would go out doing so right next to his brother or his father, protecting them, and he couldn’t hate that. He couldn’t hate dying to save the only people he had, couldn’t hate the idea of dying like a warrior._

_Sonny looked a little unsettled, like he was surprised to hear Dean mentioning death so easily—to which Dean remembered that not everyone was in his line of a family business, and not everyone has had since they were small children to wrap their head around the idea of death._

_Sonny didn’t get any time to ask much more of Dean before their waitress appeared beside him, a girl around Dean’s age with a big smile. “Hey there, Sonny,” she greeted, flashing Dean a kind smile, and his stomach flip-flopped a little because she was gorgeous and he would have to be dead not to notice._

_“Robin,” Sonny greeted happily, grinning up at her. “How are you?”_

_“Doin’ good,” she said. “You?”_

_“Fantastic. This is my new ranch foreman, Dean. Don’t know if you met or not—you go to the same school.”_

_“We haven’t met, actually,” Robin said, turning to smile at Dean a little more sincerely than she had. “Hello, then. Nice to meet you.”_

_“You too,” Dean said, and he smiled back, catching how she flushed a little before clearing her throat, turning back to the notepad in her hand._

_“What can I get you boys?” she asked._

 

“What was your deal back there?” Sam demanded in a hiss as they walked away from Cus’s, Dean feeling a bit like a fool. “You were acting weird the _entire_ time. I’ve never seen you eat a burger that fast, ever. You were practically out the door before we even got our food.”

“It’s no big deal, Sammy,” Dean muttered, shoving his hands in his coat pocket and fingering his keys. “Just didn’t expect to see her there—she used to work there back in high school, but I expected her to have cleared out.”

“Why were you so freaked out to see her?” his brother demanded, walking in pace with Dean so he could stare at his reaction to his questions. “What was she, an old girlfriend or something?”

“Kind of like that,” Dean said uneasily. “Listen, drop it, alright? I’m done with everything that’s ever happened in this goddamn town—I’m ready to put it far behind in my rearview mirror. Like you said, we got some pissed off angels to look for back at the bunker.”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said, obviously not convinced, but climbing in the car without anymore argument. “Right. Okay.”

Dean slammed the car door a little too roughly behind him, cursing when his phone rang before he could put the key into the ignition. He dug it out, glancing at the number, before answering, “Sonny?”

“Dean,” Sonny said, sounding freaked. “Dean, it happened again. Something invisible just drowned Ruth in the bathtub.”

Dean paused, and then hissed, “ _What_?”

 

_Dean took a deep breath as he stood at the landline, clutching the receiver as he listened to it ring on the other end. Sonny was lingering in the living room, no doubt waiting to see if anyone picked up, wanting to hear what Dean would say to the absentee family. Dean’s jaw clenched and he turned to stare determinedly at the wall, breathing through his teeth._

_At the last ring, he got an answer. “Hello?” a voice asked cautiously._

_“Bobby,” Dean said, taking a deep breath. “Hey, it’s me. Dean.”_

_“Dean, Jesus,” Bobby said, sounding pleased. “It’s been too long, son. You still at that damn camp?”_

_“Yeah, I am, actually. I was wondering if you had a number for me to call my dad at.”_

_“He didn’t leave one,” Bobby told him, sighing. “But he’s coming by in a few days to pick up your brother, so I can give him a message. You alright?”_

_“Yeah, Bobby, I’m fine—it’s just that the charges were dropped, and I don’t have to be here anymore. Dad can come and pick me up anytime.”_

_“That’s good to hear, boy,” Bobby told him, supportive, and Dean felt a small surge of pride in his chest because he knew Bobby would usually always be on his side, and that was nice. Bobby was one of his dad’s hunting friends, one of the guys his dad trusted the most on the planet, and he was like an uncle to Dean and Sam. Knowing that he could leave made Dean want to drop the phone and run to Sioux Falls to wait for his dad with Sammy, and then for everything to get back to normal._

_“Tell him when you see him to come soon, okay?” Dean asked, letting hope leak into his voice. “I—I don’t want to be here for much longer.”_

_“I’ll tell him,” Bobby assured him sadly, because both he and Dean knew that, if John was still mad at Dean, Dean was going to be staying in that boy’s home until John was damn well ready to forgive him. There was the sound of rustling on Bobby’s end before he murmured, “Your brother’s in the other room, reading a book—want me to go and get him for you?”_

_Dean wanted to say yes, wanted so desperately to speak to his brother again, but he knew it would raise questions. He knew that Sam probably didn’t believe their excuse for his absence completely, but a casual call from Dean where he couldn’t answer any questions was definitely not going to help his doubt. Dean could always handle Sammy better when they were in person._

_So Dean let out a long breath, disappointment thick in his throat, and he said, “No—I don’t know how I could answer him, you know?”_

_“I understand,” Bobby told him, and it really sounded like he did. “You take care of yourself up there, alright, boy? And if your daddy don’t want to come pick you up when he shows up, I’ll come up there and drag you home myself.”_

_Dean smiled a little and said, “Thanks, Bobby.”_

_“See you soon, Dean,” Bobby said, and they hung up._

_Sonny was by his side almost instantly. “Your old man didn’t leave a number for you?” Sonny demanded, sounding almost angry. “Where do you all normally live?”_

_“We’re always travelling,” Dean explained softly, wincing. “He’s somewhere new now—but he should be done with his job in about a week, so I’ll probably see him then. If not, then my uncle is going to come up.”_

_“What does your dad do?”_

_“He’s . . . kind of like a cop.”_

_“A private detective.”_

_“Kind of,” Dean said, “but yeah, that’s about it.”_

_Sonny nodded slowly, a frown on his face._

_“I’m going to go get ready for bed,” Dean told him awkwardly, taking a step toward the stairs. “School tomorrow, and all that.”_

_“You seemed to take a liking to Robin,” Sonny commented innocently, and Dean looked back at him so fast that his neck almost cricked. Sonny was watching him the way he always was. “She seemed to take a liking to you as well, if I noticed correctly.”_

_Dean almost said more, but he wasn’t used to be teased by a grown man, so he said, “Night, Sonny.”_

_Sonny laughed, shaking his head with a grin. “Goodnight, Dean.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So a part in this episode that occurred in this chapter always pissed me off extremely--the part where Sonny tells Dean about loyalty, and how Glass wrote it like Dean just accepted that he shouldn't be more loyal to others than himself. It's extremely inaccurate to what we see in the show. From the beginning, Dean's always criticized about being the perfect little soldier, always loyal to an absent father, and it takes a little bit for him to even stand up to his dad, close to the end of the first season, when this speech and acceptance about loyalty would have happened almost ten years before. I don't know. That part never quite sat right with me, and I wanted to point it out.
> 
> Honestly, especially from Act II onward, this entire plot takes a terrible tailspin, so I'm going to be adding a little more of my own ideas. Especially with how Sam was at Bobby's. I mean, come on. Bobby took this kid in for such a long period of time, and it was NEVER mentioned? Glass. Seriously. What are you doing.
> 
> Sorry for the rant. From here on out, this when the plot REALLY starts to eat at me, and I hope I do it a better justice.


	5. Act II, Part Two

“What gives, Sonny?” Dean demanded as he and Sam jogged up to the house, watching the coroner van’s doors slam behind a body bag. Dean slipped his fake FBI badge back into his jacket pocket, looking around at the rest of the house, always expecting to find signs of a fire, always going back to what had happened in Lawrence. He breathed only slightly easier when he found nothing obviously disturbed.

“I couldn’t get inside of the room,” Sonny told Dean sadly, a little shakily, but Sonny had seen worse in his years, and so had Dean. “I tried to get in to save her, but the damn door wouldn’t open.”

“Locked?” Sam asked.

“There’s no locks on the farm,” Sonny informed him somberly, making a face.

“Well, that’s great,” Dean said sarcastically before turning to his brother, muttering low enough that the cops passing by couldn’t overhear, “That means our little field trip to the cemetery was a bust.” Dean looked back to Sonny. “Sonny, has there been anything else weird happening around here? These things usually don’t just happen randomly. Did you buy anything old, read from any creepy-looking books?”

“What, like that weird thing you used to do?” Sonny demanded, and Dean sighed, knowing Sonny wasn’t taking it out on him personally, that he was just shook up, but Dean couldn’t help but to feel the residual sting of how many times John had turned around from a bad situation and did the same thing.

“Sonny, please, anything helps.”

“Until now, nothing weird that I know about,” Sonny explained to them, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “But—something a little odd—after Ruth—she always carried her rosary beads everywhere, but it wasn’t in the bathroom when I found her. I can’t find them anywhere.”

“And that’s uncharacteristic of her?” Sam asked.

“You’ve seen her,” Sonny commented, and Sam nodded, looking back up at the house cautiously.

“Alright, let’s start with the vics, then,” Sam announced, glancing to Dean as if to check for his approval. “They’re the most common denominator—both lived in the house. They both looked after the boys—maybe they saw something that Ruth didn’t tell us about.”

“Worth a shot,” Dean nodded. “I’ll have a chat with the rug-rats and see if they know anything wonky. One of them might have spotted something weird and told Ruth or Jack and they didn’t believe them.”

“Alright,” Sam said, turning to Sonny. “Sonny, you, uh, got any employee records on the victims?”

“In my office. Let’s go now,” Sonny told him, gesturing for Sam to follow him, and the two walked toward the house, leaving Dean standing in the yard, watching silently as the coroner van pulled away, long since immune to the sickly feeling of realizing someone he had just spoken to hours ago was dead and gone, but still a little disturbed at the spirit’s quick thirst for blood. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets, watching the van disappear.

A cop sauntered out from around the house and spotted Dean like a hawk. He immediately moved over to him, a scowl on his face, his eyes narrowed.

Dean wanted to laugh the moment he saw the deputy’s face, the same deputy that had once tried very hard to put Dean behind bars, but he managed to screw his face into a patient smile, if a little condescending.

“You the Fed?” the deputy grunted, looking him up and down. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a suit?”

“Just got called in last minute,” Dean explained to him easily, shrugging. “This isn’t exactly my first choice in a case, getting called out to something like this.”

“I don’t know why you’re here, anyway,” the deputy drawled, frowning, “’cause it was one of them there boys, I’m sure of it. A couple of ‘em have a bit of a violent past, and Sonny’s place might not be enough to save them all.”

“Well, unless those junior high kids know how to animate a dead tractor or lock and un-lockable door from the inside, while being accounted for elsewhere on the ranch,” Dean replied unkindly, “then I think you need to think a little harder about the case.”

The deputy’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t reply. He looked Dean up and down once, like he was reading him, and huffed, backing away.

“If that’s what you wanna believe,” the deputy replied flippantly, shaking his head before turning and walking away back into his miserable existence, storming away from the house and inhabitants he so obviously hated, and Dean watched from where he was standing, his lip curling back into a snarl, thinking that, even if he had suffered so much over the last several years since he had last seen the man, Dean was obviously more happy in his own skin, and Dean shook his head as he watched the police car pull away and disappear behind the coroner van, thinking about how weird it must be to be completely normal and unaware.

Dean pulled his hands from his pockets and started to walk around the house, figuring the boys would all be working around this time, and he heard the sound of several of them yelling, laughing, the sound anything but friendly. Dean picked up the pace, turning the corner of the house quickly to see two boys looming over a smaller one— _Timmy,_ Dean realized with a shock—and they were laughing at him.

Dean grabbed the boys by the back of their shirts and tugged them a step away from the smaller boy, the bullies yelling in surprise and outrage. Dean’s eyes flashed as he looked down at them, scowling, and he looked back to Timmy, who was pushing himself back onto his feet using the house, his eyes on his toes, shrinking before Dean’s eyes. The tilt of his neck, the helplessness of his hands—it suddenly reminded Dean of the nights when Sammy would ask where their dad was, why he had left them, sad and helpless and just a kid, and it did nothing but fueled Dean’s anger.

“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded, looking between the three boys, letting the two bullies go. The bullies stumbled a few steps nervously away from him, tugging at their shirts, and Timmy stayed rooted to the spot, staring down still, looking like he wished he were invisible. “Am I talking to myself here?”

“Nothing,” one of the bullies told him, looking cautious. “Nothing happened.”

“Right,” Dean said, not convinced. “Timmy?”

Timmy didn’t respond, his feet shuffling awkwardly.

“Were these two kids pushing you around?” Dean demanded when Timmy didn’t say anything, and Timmy’s silence was enough to tell Dean the answer if he hadn’t already known clearly what had been happening right before he turned the corner of the house. Dean turned on the two other boys, the bullies, and they each eyed Dean cautiously. “I don’t want to see that happening again, alright? Or I won’t be nearly as nice next time.”

“Yeah?” one of the kids challenged him, a chubbier kid with a harder face. “And who are you?”

Dean pulled out his fake badge, showing the three boys. Timmy’s eyes went wide, and the two bullies looked a little uneasy. “Where were you all this morning when Ruth had her accident?”

“We weren’t even here this morning,” one of the kids assured Dean quickly, making a face. “Sonny sent us into town to get some chicken feed, we swear.”

“What about Ruth, what can you tell me about her?” Dean asked the boys.

“She was a real Bible-thumping hard-ass,” the kid that couldn’t possibly be over the age of eleven deadpanned. Dean blinked, torn between laughing and actually being an adult and telling him off, and he somehow managed a happy medium of just not responding.

“Alright,” Dean said, looking between the two bullies. “What else? Anything different or weird around here that you can think of?”

“You mean besides Timmy?” the kid that was quite the little shit asked Dean, and then laughed.

Dean kneeled down right in front of the bullies, looking them right in the eyes and reaching up to point at them, his jaw clenching in anger. “Hey, listen to me—if either of you touch him ever again, I’m gonna make life real hard for you, alright? I don’t want to hear that shit again. Now go do your chores or something—just get the hell away from Timmy, you hear?”

The bullies looked like they were reveling in their bravado, but Dean knew that kind of bravado well enough to know that he had really shook them up, and they would probably listen to him, not because they respected authority—most of the kids here didn’t give a rat’s ass about it—but because Dean probably wasn’t the most reassuring looking guy to be threatened by. They glanced at each other before quickly shuffling away, whispering to each other as they went, and Dean watched them go, his eyes narrowed, before he turned back to Timmy.

“You okay, Timmy?” Dean asked, and Timmy nodded nervously, kicking the dirt.

“Yeah,” he murmured, holding the ends of his cape tightly in his fingers, like it was his security blanket. Dean realized that it probably was.

“Listen to me, alright?” Dean said, reaching out and grabbing Timmy’s shoulders. He waited until Timmy looked up at him before he continued. “Guys like that, they’re cowards, okay? All you got to do is stand up to them once and they’re going to back off, alright? You hear me?”

Timmy nodded. “Okay.”

“Don’t worry about what’s happening around here, alright?” Dean asked him. “You’re not the only one that knows how to fight monsters, but I’ll let you know if I need the help, alright?”

Timmy smiled a little, and Dean ruffled his hair. Timmy sent him a thankful look before he took off, heading for the fields behind the barn, probably where he was supposed to be working, and Dean watched him run away, breathing out a long sigh before moving on to find the rest of the kids.

*

The bullies looked up as a car pulled up in front of the house, and the two of them watched as the waitress from the nearby restaurant, a lady named Robin, walked up into the house with a guitar case, smiling when one of the boys opened the door for her. One of the bullies snorted, pushing the lawnmower.

“Don’t know why she bothers showing up,” one of the bullies muttered, leaning forward. “No one wanted to learn to play the guitar.”

“She’s nice to look at,” the other replied.

“Dude, she’s ancient. She’s, like, thirty.”

“That doesn’t mean she can’t be hot,” the other pointed out, shrugging. “Sonny said she likes hanging around here.”

“No one likes being here, and that’s a fact,” the bully huffed, pushing the lawnmower harder. “I can’t wait until I can get the hell out of here. Waste of my time.”

“I don’t know,” the other said. “It’s not too bad. Better than juvie.”

“Barely,” the hard-ass grunted, scowling over at his friend. “You mind giving me some help, asshole?”

The other rolled his eyes, moving to take over the controls, but the lawnmower suddenly made a loud clunking sound, like something just got stuck in the propellers. The boys shared a clueless look before the hard-ass leaned down and turned it off, and the sound stopped. He tilted it to the side and the boys bent down to inspect it.

Inside of the propellers was a rosary—one that they had seen Ruth waving while she screamed at them more than once. The bullies frowned, and the hard-ass leaned forward, looking at it closer.

“What is this doing in here?” he demanded. “Did it fall off her body or something? That’s nasty.”

The other bully made a sound of agreement, kneeling down and grabbing at the grass and the rosary beads tangled in the blades, pulling at them uselessly. He stuck his fingers in, trying to jimmy it out.

Neither of the boys saw the lever slowly pull itself from the off position to the on position until it was too late, and the blades were whirring again, and the boy with his fingers inside of the machine started screaming, and the witness started screaming, and the ghost that neither of them could see started laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a little rushed, and I apologize. But I just wanted to stop in and say thanks for reading! This story has hit a hundred reads, and it means a lot to me! Thank you!!


	6. Act III, Part One

“What the hell happened?” Sam demanded the moment Dean walked back through the door, looking a tad more tired than he had before they heard the screaming. Dean rubbed a hand over his face before pulling out a chair from across Sonny’s desk, behind which where Sam was sitting, and he crashed down into the seat like he couldn’t hold himself up anymore.

“Well,” Dean said slowly, “at least we found out where Ruth’s rosary went—a kid found it in the blade of a lawnmower. You can guess where that went.”

“Shit,” Sam commented, making a disgusted face. “The kid alright?”

“Sonny went with him to the hospital,” he explained, leaning back, feeling like he needed a drink or ten. “They’re gonna have to sew a couple of his fingers back on, but no permanent damage other than some physical and mental scarring. The ghost is stepping up its game.”

“It’s happening more frequently, too,” Sam pointed out, frowning. “Something is agitating it. Ten bucks says it’s because we’re here.”

“Good,” Dean replied sarcastically, nodding at the files on the desktop. “Find anything interesting?”

“Just one,” Sam said, flipping to the bottom, where a file was still open, so he could read from it. “One of the boys here has a bit of an odd history—his mother died violently in an undisclosed way, and not one of his relatives or one of her friends or anything stepped forward to identify or take him. He was shipped to a bunch of different foster homes but ran away from every single one of them, so they brought him here when Sonny offered to take him, and he stopped running. The kid knows all of the victims, since he lives here, and he’s the only one raising any red flags.”

“I’ll check him out. What’s his name?”

Sam checked the file. “Timothy Sherman.”

Dean couldn’t help the snort he let out. “ _Timmy_? You think _Timmy_ is controlling some terrifying ghost?”

“You know the kid?” Sam asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah, I’ve run into him a couple of times,” Dean explained, suddenly feeling a nervous dread sinking into his stomach. “I just ran into him outside, right before the accident. He was—oh, _shit_.”

“What?”

“The kid that got his fingers diced,” Dean said. “Him and another kid were pushing Timmy around right before I got there and broke them up. And Timmy told me the first time we met that Jack used to yell at him a lot. I didn’t know what he thought about Ruth, but she seemed a little strict.”

Sam’s eyebrows were up, and Dean knew that look. Dean leaned back in his chair, feeling a little sick, grimacing.

“So you think we’ve got a Damien on our hands?”

“I don’t know,” Sam confessed, “but there’s no such things as coincidences, Dean. You know that.”

“I know,” Dean told him a little impatiently, “but this kid—he’s a nerdy omega. I’m having a hard time to think he’s setting an angry spirit on the people mean to him on purpose.”

“It might not be on purpose,” Sam pointed out, tapping the file. “It says his whole family is more than likely dead—it might be an overprotective family member. And, if his mom died a violent death, he might very well own something of hers that is keeping her around, and she is just getting angrier and angrier as she tries to protect her son.”

Dean hated to think of anything bad when it came to Timmy, but it wasn’t a perk of his job to ignore some facts like this. He nodded slowly, putting the pieces together—angry Jack saying the wrong thing, strict Ruth pushing a little too far, a relentless bully who hurt him. And Timmy probably had no damn idea that any of this was his fault.

“Did it say why he kept running from Child Services?”

“Nope,” Sam told him, shrugging. “I could probably call, but I don’t really think it matters once we can figure out what is keeping the ghost attached to him.”

“If weird has been following this kid for as long as it looks like, he’s probably noticed it by now. I’ll see if I can find him anywhere and ask him what he knows—he doesn’t know who you are, and you’d probably freak him out.”

“I’ll see if I can find anything more about him,” Sam said, “but I doubt it. It looks like the kid came out of nowhere. It’s nothing from his birth certificate to the cops contacting Child Services.”

“Work your mojo and I’ll talk to the kid,” Dean established, pushing himself up from the chair. “Let’s hope it’s not a ghost possession—I really don’t feel like having to hold a kid down and shove salt down his throat.”

“Let me know if you need me,” Sam called to his back as Dean slipped out the door, and Dean threw a careless wave over his shoulder so his brother would know that he heard him, withdrawing back into the house and moving toward the living room, not knowing where to look—the accident and Sonny’s absence gave the kids the afternoon off, so most of them were milling all over the place, taking advantage of the rare opportunity. A stake was driven through those thoughts when he heard the soft sounds of a guitar playing from the front of the house, from the living room, and Dean immediately moved toward it without having made the executive decision to walk there. He stopped in the doorway, looking at the familiar-but-unfamiliar woman hunched over a guitar, plucking the strings and strumming with concentration. He paused, watching her, remembering again.

 

 

_Robin and Dean were sixteen again, sitting on the front porch on the swing that used to be out there but, in present day, had long since rusted away and been forgotten. Dean was softly pushing with his feet, feeling the soft brush of her arm every once in a while as she strummed absently at her guitar, concentrating on what she was doing, and Dean watched her with a small grin, for some reason finding her serious face adorable. She was somewhere in the middle of a song Dean had never heard before when she glanced over at Dean, smiling timidly when she caught him watching her, and he offered a barely sheepish grin in return._

_“So, you’ve been a lot of places?” she asked him, still playing, and he nodded slowly, not so used to opening up to people he didn’t know well, not used to sharing that part of himself. So he withdrew as far as he could, and he thought of the bare minimum answer._

_“Yeah,” Dean said slowly. “My, uh, my dad likes to move around a lot.”_

_“What does your dad do?”_

_“Boring stuff,” Dean told her, grinning._

_She rolled her eyes back, looking back down at the guitar as her fingers formed a tricky chord. “Do you like whatever it is he does?”_

_Dean shrugged and said, “It’s alright. He expects me to follow in his footsteps, and I guess it’s not too bad of a thing to have to do, you know?”_

_She nodded back and said, “My pop expects me to take over the diner once he’s ready to give it up. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, though. It’s not what I want to do.”_

_“Sometimes I don’t think that I want to do what my dad wants me to do,” Dean admitted, and he wondered where his reluctance to talk about his feelings went because this was something he had never told_ anyone _, not a single soul, barely even himself, and here he was confessing it all to a girl he had met a few days ago at a diner. “I mean, what he does is awesome, but it’s . . . I don’t know. Sometimes I think it would almost be more fun to be a mechanic.”_

_“A mechanic?” she asked, surprised, turning to look at him. She placed the guitar carefully on the bench beside her so she could turn to look at Dean more fully, tilting her head in curiosity. “You know how to fix cars?”_

_“It’s something my dad has been teaching me since I was a kid,” he told her, still wondering what about her made him actually talk about himself, and not lie like he normally did. “My dad’s got this friend with an auto yard, and sometimes we stay with him and he teaches me some more things on different cars.”_

_“Being a mechanic sounds like it would be rough,” she commented._

_“No, no, not at all,” Dean explained, getting that warm feeling of excitement through his veins as his hands came up and started gesturing, like he was trying to paint a picture in the air of it just so she could understand. “Cars are cool as hell. There are a ton of them, and they—they’re kind of like puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, right? Fixing them is like putting all the right pieces together, and you finally get it right and looking like the picture on the box and you know that you did it and it’s awesome. And the best part is that, when you’re done, you’ve fixed this awesome thing and you give it back to someone who needed the help, and you can let it go and move onto the next one. Sometimes, with my dad’s job, it’s kind of like that, but cars—it’s less responsibility. You_ know _you’ve fixed a car, and not_ think _that you’ve fixed it. You know?”_

_She was looking at him funny, smiling, and he recognized the look a split second before she leaned forward and kissed him, quick and soft, before suddenly pulling away, her cheeks red._

_“Sorry,” she mumbled, looking awkward. “Have you, uh, ever . . . kissed anyone?”_

_Dean thought about the girls who barely had faces in his memories, the small number of girls he had met when they were in a place long enough for him to go to school. He had met a couple of girls in high school who thought he was cute and he had kissed them, but it wasn’t more than he could count on two hands—_ barely _enough to count on two hands. So he nodded, offering no other explanation, and she blushed darker, and he couldn’t help the small smile that lit up his face._

 _He took the initiative this time and leaned forward, kissing her again with a little more pressure and a little more time, and he felt her shift ever so slightly closer, and the feeling in his chest notifying him of cruising into crush territory burned a little brighter despite how much he tried to push it away, no matter how much he should have pushed_ her _away._

_Dean pulled away from her only far enough to whisper, “What are your plans for three days from now?”_

_She smiled a little, her eyes lighting up, and she asked, “Friday? The day of the dance?”_

_He grinned a little and she blushed again, and he couldn’t help but to love that look on her face. “The very same.”_

_“I’ll be at the dance,” she told him, looking at him with muffled hope, and he was glad he wasn’t ever too much of a nervous person when it came to talking with girls or else he would have totally fucked up what he said next._

_“Save me a dance?” he asked, reaching out and running his hand through a strand of her hair, and she closed her eyes._

_“Dean Winchester,” she said, “you can have the whole thing.”_

_He grinned and kissed her again, and they spent the rest of the night making out on the porch swing, and talking about what they wanted to be, and laughing at each other’s jokes, and it was the first time Dean had really felt like he wanted to have a normal life, to be free._

 

 

In real time, Robin looked up like she had felt someone staring at her, and she looked back at Dean strangely, quizzically, raising an eyebrow. “Can I help you? You’re the guy from the diner, aren’t you?”

“The very same,” Dean told her, grinning. “Have you seen Timmy around here anywhere?”

“He should be here soon,” she explained to him, frowning at him, and there was another soft stabbing at his stomach as he realized again and again that she really didn’t have an idea who she was talking to. “I give the boys guitar lessons, and his starts in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to cancel that,” he told her.

A sharp splash of surprise covered her face before the defiance kicked in, and she demanded, “Why?”

“You’re going to have to get out of here,” he told her simply, glancing obviously to the door. “I don’t have time to explain why. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

And then she said, “I’m _not_ going to make that mistake again”, and it punched Dean hard in the stomach.

“Oh,” he said lamely. “So you _do_ recognize me.”

Something sad crossed into her eyes, like she had been hoping she was wrong. She put her guitar on the couch next to her and stood awkwardly, crossing her arms over her chest, looking at Dean squarely. “I thought you looked familiar at the diner, but then I saw you talking to the cops outside after the kid with the lawnmower and, seeing you here, I realized I knew you.”

“I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t,” Dean admitted easily, smiling sheepishly, but a tiny feeling of regret stung at his chest. Robin looked into his eyes like she had nothing to hide, and Dean had long ago forgotten what that feeling must be like.

“How would I forget the guy who was my first kiss? Dean,” she said, like she testing his name on her tongue. “I honestly don’t remember your last name.”

“I don’t remember yours either—Robin.”

They spent a few seconds just looking at each other, just remembering for a moment, before she suddenly cleared her throat, and Dean hunkered down, knowing he was about to hear it, before she softened and whispered, “So what did you end up doing?”

Dean didn’t expect it, but he knew exactly what she was asking, and he never would have thought that would be her first question if she had known who he was. He cleared his throat awkwardly, glancing away from her, like he was looking for a way out.

“I, uh,” Dean said, ready to lie, before he smiled a little and said honestly, “I ended up doing exactly what I was expected to do.”

“Same with me,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I guess, when we were kids, we didn’t realize what actually mattered. We just thought we knew better. And we didn’t.”

“No,” Dean said, looking back at her. “No, we definitely didn’t get it.”

“I have a feeling that, even if I asked you why,” she told him, “you wouldn’t actually explain why you left like you did.”

“There were,” Dean started and then stopped, wincing when he remembered the whole of the reason why, and he flinched a little, because she had no idea what had actually happened, and he didn’t really want her to—because she might be the only person here that would really understand his reaction. “There were a lot of reasons why I had to leave when I did, Robin. And I don’t think I need to explain them to you.”

She looked sad when she looked at him, and he knew she understood when she whispered, “Yeah—I think I’ve always known.”

Dean cleared his throat, glancing around, but there was still no Timmy, and, for some reason, that made him a little nervous. “Look, Robin,” he said, turning back to her and putting his serious face back on, working the job instead of jumping back into what could have been and almost was. “I have to get you out of here right now.”

“What?” she asked, confused. “Dean, what—?”

“I’m sorry,” a familiar voice said somewhere behind Dean, toward the kitchen, and Dean whirled, his hand going automatically toward the gun he kept in a holster at his hip, hidden by his jacket. Timmy was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking like he had been crying, and he looked scared as he stared at them. Dean’s skin was washed with ice cold when he looked at the boy, and Dean realized with added dread that it wasn’t fear—it was the telltale cold of a not-so-nice spirit.

“Sorry about what, Timmy?” Dean asked slowly, taking a cautious step toward the boy, still not knowing exactly what to expect. Tears leaked from Timmy’s eyes.

“I can’t stop it,” he told them right before a vase sitting on the table next to Dean exploded, shards flying everywhere, and Dean automatically ducked and covered his face, and Robin made a loud surprised sound.

“Robin!” Dean yelled, jumping forward and grabbing her wrist, tugging her with him toward the door, pushing her behind him, and she stumbled with him almost numbly, looking properly shocked at what was happening, and Dean couldn’t really blame her. They stumbled into the entry as he told her, “Go, go, go!”

He yanked the door open and pushed her through. She yelled his name, but he managed a quick smirk and a muttered _trust me_ before the door slammed shut in their faces, the door yanked out of Dean’s hands, the sound of both the front and back door locking loud in the house, and invisible hands suddenly tugged him backwards until he landed flat on his back, taking the rug with him as he was dragged back by something he couldn’t see. Dean grunted, grabbing onto the side of the stairs, getting a decent hold. He felt the hands tug harder, and Dean made a face as he felt exactly where he would inevitably bruise later.

“Sam!” Dean yelled loudly, his voice echoing through the house as his hands came free, and he was thrown through the air into the living room, landing hard against the corner of the table. He heard loud footsteps, inevitably from his moose brother, and yelled, “Living room!”

The ghost threw him again, and he landed on tile and automatically corrected himself by calling, “Kitchen!”

Timmy stood against the wall, shrinking in on himself as he watched, staring at Dean with fear and pity as the spirit suddenly let go of him, the pressure disappearing as Sam rocketed into the room with an iron fire poker in his hands, looking around. Dean groaned, lifting himself from the ground, and Sam was at his side helping him up in an instant.

“What happened?” Sam demanded loudly, looking around, seeing Timmy hunched against the wall. “What’s going on?”

“The ghost doesn’t seem to like me,” Dean replied. “We need salt. Circle—now.”

Sam dove toward the cabinets and Dean was close behind, both of them tearing through them, searching for anything they could use. Sam made a successful noise when he grabbed a decent tub of table salt, and he immediately started a salt circle in the middle of the room.

“Timmy,” Dean said, gesturing, trying to urge him closer. “Timmy, please, get in the circle.”

“It’s not going to work,” Timmy told him, sounding devastated, tears rolling heavy down his face. “She’ll just—she’ll open the windows and make it breezy and the salt will go away.”

Dean and Sam froze for the single heartbeat it took for them to understand what Timmy had just said, and they exchanged a flabbergasted look before turning back to the child, who was watching them like he expected them to start yelling or telling him he was crazy. “Timmy,” Dean choked out, “how did you know that?”

“I tried,” he whispered softly, flinching, “and she’s done it before.”

“Your mom, isn’t it?” Sam asked, catching both Dean and Timmy off guard. “Your mom died, and she’s still sticking around, isn’t she?”

Timmy nodded slowly, looking at them with wide eyes. “You’re like her, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Dean asked, and Timmy looked at him, and all Dean could see was the little boy with the cape, the little boy who looked like he had wanted to melt into the wall when he was cornered by bullies, and Dean was almost too busy feeling bad for Timmy to properly hear what he said next. Almost.

Timmy said, “You hunt monsters, don’t you? You’re monster hunters—just like my mom.”

And Dean replied, “ _What?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adding some creative license.


	7. Act III, Part Two

Timmy seemed to take Dean’s shock at his confession in the wrong way—he flinched away, folding closer into himself, and he looked so lost that Dean wanted to punch himself for making him feel that way. Dean kneeled down in front of Timmy, reaching out and holding his shoulders, and Timmy leaned away from the embrace, cringing, like he expected his grip to be much tighter.

Dean tensed, recognizing the signs of that, and his voice was tighter than he expected it to be when he said in a measured tone, “Timmy, I need you to tell me what you meant by that. Your mom was a hunter?”

Timmy hesitated before he nodded, and Dean looked to Sam, who looked equally as baffled. Timmy fidgeted anxiously before he said, “The monsters took my big sister, and my mom got angry and we moved around a lot. And then the monsters took my mom too.”

“It was a fire, wasn’t it?” Sam asked suddenly from behind Dean, and Dean turned to find Sam knelt down on the ground just behind him as well, still making him taller than Timmy but a lot less intimidating, and Dean was thankful for it. Sam’s eyes were soft and kind, the way that they were when they talked to victims, and it was so much like having his old brother back, just his brother and none of this other shit piled on top of him, that Dean would have smiled if it wasn’t for the current situation, and Dean could still feel the sticky darkness in the air, breathing it in like a last-ditch effort. Timmy looked to Sam in surprise, looking almost over Dean, and he glanced at Dean once like if he was checking to see if Sam could be trusted with the information.

Dean smiled a little and offered an encouraging nod, and Timmy was off.

“I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Timmy told them slowly, his eyes sad and afraid and ashamed. “She told me to stay at the motel, but I was scared of the dark, and scared of being alone, so I begged to go along and she told me to stay in the car and not make noise, and I did. I think they were vampires, but I—I didn’t really look. Something happened and I got out of the car like my mommy said not to and I saw the house—it was on fire, and it was hot, and I was afraid to go near it.”

Timmy suddenly choked up, looking away suddenly, and Sam looked at him with pity, knowing but not knowing, but Dean’s throat was suddenly choked, and he thought he was about to suffocate on his own air. He could still remember the fire of the night their mother died—over all the other traumas, that was one of the ones he dreamed the most frequently about—and he hated that another kid out there, another kid too young to have to deal with that kind of thing, was out in the world dreaming about it and suffering about how a fire had taken their mother away from him.

And Timmy had already lost so much before that. He had lost his sister to monsters, and who the hell knows what might have happened to his father before that. And then he had to live knowing what happened to his mom but not being able to really say.

Timmy started talking again, big tears rolling down his face, and Dean almost knew what he was about to say before he said it.

“I-I looked into the window in the front of the house,” Timmy explained to them shakily, clutching hard at the edge of the blanket-cape Dean hadn’t even realized Timmy was wearing, and it felt like he was burning from the inside out, seeing now why Timmy clung to the idea of being a superhero, and he understood why he had found him in the barn hunting monsters because he didn’t think anyone else would know to look at them. And Dean definitely knew before Timmy continued speaking what would happen next. Timmy coughed thickly before continuing, “I could see the fire through the window, and I could see her. She was—hitting the window, really hard, like it wouldn’t open, and I don’t know if she saw me or not but I think she did, and she was yelling, and I was really scared and—and I didn’t know what to do—and then I couldn’t see her anymore. And then the whole house was burning, and I was scared and hid in the car until the police came and they made me go to houses I didn’t like, and I kept running. They took me here and I stayed—I stayed because, one of the beds—it has all of those symbols my mom used to put around the motel room, on the bed. It made me feel safe.”

“I put those there,” Dean explained slowly, mechanically, because he couldn’t think of the right words to say about what Timmy had just told them, because the words hadn’t come to him yet. “Back when I was here, I was just as afraid of the monsters as you are.”

“My mommy is one of the monsters,” Timmy choked through his tears, looking around for her fearfully. “She’s mad, and I think it’s at me, and it makes me scared, because I don’t know what I did, if she saw me at the house, because I couldn’t save her—”

The kid was about to go into hysterics. Sam swooped in like he dealt with it all the time, like he was the superhero, and Dean wasn’t affronted to think that he had always been the sidekick to his brainiac little brother, the same one that he saved from the fire.

“Hey,” Sam said, waiting until Timmy looked at him to keep talking. “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? There is nothing wrong with being scared, even if it makes you do things you might think you regret later. Being scared isn’t bad—okay?”

“I was afraid of my mom, sometimes, before,” Timmy explained softly, looking down at his hands. “Sometimes, she wasn’t so nice.”

Dean couldn’t speak, because it was like he was looking into a portal to the past, and he was staring at himself, and he wanted to be sick because no one deserved to go through what he did, especially a young and kind kid like this. For a moment, Dean was almost glad that Timmy had let her burn if she did something to give him that terrified look on his face.

Sam swallowed hard, glancing at Dean, but Dean was still staring at Timmy like he was in a trance, like he was trying to break from it. Sam cleared his throat. “What happened after that, Timmy? When did you start seeing your mom again?”

“When they started putting me in those houses with the other kids, the ones who had also lost their parents,” Timmy explained, flinching. “They weren’t nice, and she kept showing up, and I would get scared and run away, and she would always find me. She found me here again, even if I told her not to. I prayed to angels like she told me to, but nothing happened.”

Sam looked thoroughly surprised. Dean, meanwhile, felt like he was going to be sick.

“Angels,” Dean said slowly, “aren’t much of a help.”

Timmy looked at him but didn’t respond to his statement, and Dean hadn’t even known why he had said it. Sam looked at Dean, even more taken aback, but Timmy was speaking again. “It was my mom, that hurt all of these people here. She killed Mr. Jack, and Miss Ruth, the way she used to kill the bad guys, but they—they weren’t the bad guys, and I don’t understand why she would hurt them. And I think she did that thing to Kenneth—I think she hurt him because he was being mean to me. I want it to stop, Dean,” Timmy suddenly said, turning to look at Dean with his big, watery eyes, desperation creeping into his tone, a kid that just couldn’t handle this pressure anymore. “I want it all to go away. I miss my mommy but _she_ isn’t my mommy.”

Dean remembered back to the last time he had seen his mom, technically—back way a long time ago, before Hell and demon deals, before Sam and Dean had even found their dad again. He remembered being in his old house and Sam and him being attacked by the poltergeist, and he remembered how his mother had been protecting all of the children in the house, how she had stepped in and destroyed herself to protect her sons. Dean remembered when she looked at them, the way she had a form of burning but how it disappeared when they spoke to her, how she was still kind and thoughtful and a hunter, and Dean’s stomach twisted a little but it was a happy kind of twisting. He remembered the way she smiled, the way he always thought she did, and he clung to all of the moments he last saw her spirit before she passed on.

“She is a spirit, Timmy, and a vengeful one—did your mom ever tell you about those?” Sam was asking, and Dean heard him like it was on the other end of a tunnel. “To get rid of them, we need to burn something that is hers that she might have given to you—because she’s holding onto it, and it’s keeping her from passing like spirits should. Can you think of anything that might be like this?”

Timmy didn’t look like it was his primary thing to focus on, and he just looked at Sam for a moment, lost. Sam tried not to look annoyed when he looked back at Dean, who had snapped out of it enough that he had gotten back to his full night and was pacing around the room, looking around, searching for something they would be able to use for a weapon.

“Dean?” Sam asked, cautiously. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Dean said distractedly, and then shook his head, coming back to the surface like he had been underwater. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Just hit a couple of pressure points.”

Sam knew exactly what he meant, and Dean was thankful that his little brother knew better than to ask right then. Sam turned back to Timmy and started to say, “Timmy, we really need you to think about this—”

“Sam!” Dean boomed, two seconds too late—the ghost, a mangled woman covered in what Dean now knew were some seriously ugly burns, was standing behind Sam, and she reached out and tossed him across the room like Dean’s brother wasn’t a six-foot-four bear-man. Dean dove forward into the living room, grabbing at a metal poker as he felt the spirit attempting to drag him back into the kitchen, and he swung blindly behind him. He heard the sound of a gasp, and then the pressure was gone, and she was gone for at least another couple of seconds.

“You okay?” Sam groaned as he pushed himself up, looking over at Dean. Dean nodded, clutching at the poker, his eyes moving restlessly around the room.

“Everything alright over there?” Dean asked cautiously, his heart beating faster because he wanted Sam to get better, because he knew this was a bad idea, because he didn’t want something as stupid as this being one of the things to hurt his recovering brother, but Sam didn’t look at all bothered by being flung like a Raggedy Anne. He nodded, glancing around, his game face on, and Dean paused to look at him for one more long second before he looked to Timmy again.

“Timmy please,” Dean said, his tone ragged and tired, and Timmy’s eyes widened.

“I don’t know,” Timmy told him, sounding terrified, his eyes wide. “I don’t know—I don’t think—”

The windows around them suddenly shattered with the sound of a loud scream, and Sam and Dean ducked automatically, raising their hands defensively. Timmy whimpered, dropping down to the ground to curl his knees into his chest, tears relentless down his face and Dean wished there was something he could do to make the kid less helpless.

“Dean,” Sam said slowly, gripping the salt as they inched backwards, closing into a protective wall around Timmy. “Dean, what if it’s not an object that’s anchoring her here?”

“What are you talking about?” Dean demanded, but he knew, he didn’t need Sam to tell him. Dean had been in the game long enough to know the signs—but it was always reassuring to hear Sam tell him the thing he already knew, to know that he wasn’t the only one who had reached that conclusion, and it was no different this time when Sam glanced over at him, looking tired but more alive than he had in weeks, and Dean felt his adrenaline kick in.

“Maybe,” Sam said, glancing back at Timmy, “it’s him.”

And Dean replied, “Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the things I hated the most about this episode was the way Adam Glass wrote the big reveal about Timmy's mom. Jesus, was that some terrible work. "Before the car blew up" and . . . It killed me. So, yeah, I had some fun with this and added a bit of something deeper and unexpected, because cars don't typically blow up for no apparent reason, even after a crash. So. Yes. I hope you liked my unnecessary, but fun to write, backstory. 
> 
> Well! We're almost done from here! I think there are two more chapters, and then the little mini-story is over! Thank you all for reading!


	8. Act IV, Part One

“So, what, we shove a shitload of salt down his throat?” Dean demanded unkindly, complications in high-pressure situations usually causing his snippiness to come into full effect. Sam shot him an offended look, like Dean actually expected him to grab the child and overturn a saltshaker onto his face, but he still had a reserved look, the one he normally did when he was thinking.

“His mother is still clinging to him, trying to protect him,” Sam explained out loud, doing that thing where he announces what Dean already knows, but it helps Sam organize his thoughts so Dean lets him, watching him as he clutched the poker in his hand, his eyes darting around, waiting for the ghost to appear again. “She killed Jack and Ruth because they were mean to him—what if she knows who we are, and she thinks we’re going to take him away from her? To get rid of her or ward him, and she won’t be able to see him again? She’s a mother—she’s going to protect her child.”

“But if he’s the thing she’s clinging to, then we’re going to have to waste the kid, and we’re not doing that,” Dean laid down the law, giving Sam a stubborn look. “There has to be something we are missing here.”

“I don’t think she can tell the difference between what is a threat and isn’t, so she’s just getting rid of them all,” Sam said. “That’s what happened with the bullies and the lawnmower.”

“At the moment, I’m not nearly as concerned with what Mommy Dearest has _been_ doing,” Dean growled, feeling the cold creeping in again. “I’m a little more worried with what she’s going to do now that she sees me and you as Public Enemy Number One.”

“Right,” Sam said, getting an idea, and he pointed to the living room. “Go distract her for a minute, alright? I don’t know how, but just get her away from the kitchen for a few minutes.”

“I _love_ being bait,” Dean grated sardonically but did as Sam suggested anyway, meandering cautiously out into the living room, glancing around. He glanced back in time to see Sam kneeling in front of Timmy before he felt a pressure, and he whirled to find Mommy Dearest standing behind him, a woman shorter than him with scaled and irritated red skin from the burns, her clothing torn, her eyes yellow and angry, and her mouth twisted into a scowl as she reached out and grabbed at Dean, throwing him until he hit the wall, all before Dean could even consider movement. The poker clattered loudly to his feet, and he let out a rough gasp.

Mommy Dearest met his eyes before she raised her hand up and clenched it hard into a fist, and Dean let out a strangled sound—it felt like she had her hand in his chest, like she was gripping onto his heart, and every nerve in his body was on fire. His hands scrambled up to his chest, fleetingly wondering if this was what it felt to have a heart attack, breathing harshly, unable to move. The ghost just watched him almost curiously, her eyes holding no mercy.

And then Dean heard his brother’s voice, clear as a bell over the rapid beating of his heart in his ears, “Timmy? Timmy, I need your help.”

The ghost’s head snapped to look at the man who was speaking directly to her son, like she was wondering who gave Sam that right, and the pressure relieved from Dean’s chest. He gasped in air as she dropped him back onto the ground, his organs moving like they had just taken a couple of rounds with a baseball bat, but he was alive.

Dean looked over to find Sam kneeling in front of Timmy, looking him right in the eye as he told the younger boy, “Timmy, listen to me—I need you to focus. We are not going to hurt you.”

“Sam!” Dean warned when the ghost flickered into existence right behind his brother, and she looked mighty pissed. Sam swung but she was faster, and she threw him to the ground, Sam sliding away from Timmy with the force. She took a staggering step toward Sam, the waves of dark radiating from her like a sign of her power.

Dean pushed himself from the ground and threw himself back into the fray in the kitchen, grabbing at salt and calling, “Sammy!”

The ghost bitch didn’t even look at him, just clenched her fist, and Dean was having a heart attack again. He grunted, clutching at his chest, thinking that, if he survived this, he was not going to forget how much he fucking hated going on ghost hunts.

Timmy stood in the middle of it all, his hands shaking at his side as he stared helplessly around him, and he whispered, “I can’t stop her.”

“Timmy, you have to try, okay?” Dean managed to growl out around the pressure on his vital organ, wincing when she flexed her hand, still standing over Sam like a warning, telling him not to get up and move back closer to her son.

The ghost sent Dean a baleful, hostile look when he spoke to her son, but he ignored her as Sam groaned from the floor, reaching up and touching his head, and the move wasn’t because of the fall—he recognized it as a move Sam had adopted since the Trials had started to kick his ass, a tell that he wasn’t alright on the inside, and Dean’s protective instincts went through the roof.

If he had been a flaming mom-bitch, he probably would have torn the enemy apart if it were Sammy he was protecting. He knew it like he knew his own name and date of birth. He knew it in how much he had always sacrificed for his brother, and how much he knew he would give in the future for him, no matter what, no matter how much Sam ended up hated him (because he would, and Dean knew that). Sam was the only good Dean had ever done, and he would do whatever it took for him.

Dean looked at Timmy’s mother, dead and broken and burnt and protecting her son fiercely, the way of a hunter losing her mind, and he understood.

“When she died, you were in danger, Timmy,” Dean called out to the boy, seeking out his eyes and holding his gaze. “She didn’t know if any of the vamps had gotten out, and she was scared she wouldn’t be able to protect you. She would do anything to keep you safe, Timmy. But you’re the only one that can tell her that this, what she is doing—you’re the only one she will listen to if you tell her that this is dangerous. That this might hurt you. And that it already does.”

“She’s my mom,” Timmy sobbed, choked, and Dean felt protectiveness so strong that his heart would have broken if there was any of it left, withered away in self-hatred and suppressed emotions, all locked away. Dean understood what was happening here—God did he understand—and it would have been enough to kill him if he wasn’t already long dead inside.

“She’s a ghost now, Timmy, and she’s going to just get meaner the longer you can’t let her go,” Dean explained slowly, gasping around the pain in his chest, and he heard Sam’s low groan from the other side of the kitchen, and a fresh surge of panic pulsed through him. “Timmy—I know what it’s like to have to let someone you love like this go, okay? I know what it’s like to bury a parent, and it’s the worst in the world. You want to hold them close, especially knowing that they can come back, but the things they become—they become the monsters we hunt, Timmy, whether they want to or not. They just become angrier and angrier until it doesn’t matter who it was angry at before, until it’s just going to lose control. You don’t need to see that, Timmy. You have to let her go before it’s too late.

“You’ll be safe here, Timmy. No one is going to hurt you. You’re safe. Let her go.”

Timmy, shaking, said, “Mommy, stop.”

“Kung Fu grip, Timmy,” Dean gasped as his mother offered up a prime example of one on his ribcage.

“Mommy, stop!” Timmy screamed, suddenly exploding, and it caught them all off-guard. The ghost released Sam and Dean, turning to her son with surprise, humanity flickering across her face, and Dean saw her expression drop in horror when she saw the devastation in Timmy’s face, realizing what she has done. Timmy stepped shakily toward her and she watched him, still looking shocked, and he continued, “You have to stop hurting people! That’s not what you said we do! You said that hunters protect people, but you have done nothing but hurt them!”

His mother blinked. Timmy’s hands were not longer clutching at his cape—he was standing up straight, staring her down strongly and defiantly, his hands clenched into firm fists.

“I know you want to protect me,” Timmy told her resolutely, “but I don’t need you to. There are other people who can do it when you’re gone, if you will let them. You—you have to go, Mommy. I don’t want you to leave, but you have to, because that’s the way ghosts work. Don’t come back. I’m going to be okay. I promise.”

Timmy reached up and unhooked a pendant from around his neck—a locket, obviously the one the ghost had been holding onto, and Dean would have kicked himself for not checking if he wasn’t so enraptured by what was happening in the kitchen, if he could look away from what he was seeing. Timmy held up the locket, fumbling to open it with unsteady fingers, and he pointed to the pictures that Dean couldn’t see, at the wrong angle, but he could guess.

“You couldn’t protect them,” Timmy said, voice coated his sadness, despair, and Dean knew it was his father and his sister, and even the ghost crumpled when she saw the picture, her brightness dimming. Timmy clutched the pendant for a minute before he looked at his mom and said, “You died to protect me, Mom. You saved me. But now it’s time to go.”

The ghost didn’t move. She just watched as Timmy crossed to the fireplace, and he stared at the fire for a moment before he looked back at his mother, his eyes shining with tears.

“I love you, Mom,” Timmy said, and then he dropped the locket into the fire.

There was no screaming. The ghost didn’t cling to something and screech and try to raise hell, because, if Dean could guess, passing on when you didn’t want to was probably more than a little painful. But Timmy’s mother didn’t do that. The pendant began to burn and she breathed out, and she flickered into a human form—a dirty blonde woman with big brown eyes and a big smile, and she looked at her son with tears rolling down her cheeks, filled to the brim with pride and love, and Dean saw her mouth move in a goodbye before she flickered and, in a flash of light, she was gone.

For a moment, no one moved. No one knew what to do, really. This was always the uneasy part, the part where it was unclear what was right behavior. And then Timmy ran to Dean and caught him around the waist, hugging him hard and hiding his face against him, and Dean reached up and patted his back, looking up to Sam’s gaze, which was suddenly understanding and pitying and Dean realized what Sam heard him say and how he would know because Sam knew him the best, and Dean just nodded once to Sam before he looked down at Timmy and rubbed his back, taking a deep breath.

“It’s hard to let go, Tim,” Dean told the boy softly, “but it’s not impossible.”

Timmy didn’t say anything. Neither did Sam. The only one speaking when Sonny nearly broke down the door and rushed in with a frenzied Robin was Dean, murmuring assurances to a boy that reminded him too much of himself, saying anything under the sun that he thought might keep Timmy from the same fate, not knowing if it would work and not caring, because he had to say something.

The hardest part of suffering is being alone. And Dean didn’t want Timmy to think he was alone.

So he kept talking.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's one more chapter after this one that I am super excited for (I change one of the events and I think it's going to be awesome), and I hope to have it up by tonight. Thanks for reading, everyone!


	9. Act V, Part One

“This was that family business you were always talking about, right?” Robin demanded when she finally managed to get Dean alone when he ducked out to ready the Impala for the drive, her hands crossed over her chest as she looked at him carefully, like she was expecting him to bolt. “I figured your dad was a real estate agent or something, not some kind of Ghostbuster.”

“Told you it was boring,” Dean replied, smirking.

Robin laughed, shaking her head. She glanced back at the porch, where Sonny and Sam were sitting with Timmy, who was staring out into the darkness, and her face immediately twisted into pity and sadness. “Yeah, right. Boring.”

“This stuff can be a little repetitive,” Dean tried to tell her, but neither of them believed him, and he just smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Well, as you can see, I did not duck out and become a vintage car mechanic. What about you?”

“I always thought that I would hate being in the same town my entire life, and taking over the Diner like Dad always wanted me to,” she told Dean, and he remembered when they used to sit outside at lunch and talk about all of the things they could run away from, all of the things they would do when they were out from their obligations, and it almost made him a little sad to know that neither of them got to live their wildest dreams, but then Robin smiled a little, and she looked happy, and maybe it wasn’t that bad of a thing, at all. “I thought I would be suffering if I was where I am now. But I actually love it.”

“I guess we didn’t know everything we thought we did at sixteen, huh?” Dean asked, his hands in his pockets, and he glanced to Sammy as he straightened up, smiling, but he could see that he was tired, and Dean made it his resolve to get Sam to sleep the rest of the drive back to the bunker. Robin followed his eyes, and she smiled a little, shrugging.

“Not everything,” she said, “but we did get some things right.”

She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek, and Dean smiled softly at her when she pulled away, and she took a deep breath.

“I always figured you would leave this place quickly,” she told him slowly, smiling, “because you wouldn’t see your brother again if you stayed. And I could tell that was always the one thing that would change your opinion. I’m glad you two get to stick together, even after all of these years.”

“I’m glad you got to love what you do,” Dean told her, and she smiled at him again, and then they had nothing else to say. She turned and she walked away, and Dean watched her as she leaned down and took Timmy’s hand, smiling brightly, and Timmy nodded with whatever she said, glancing at Dean. Dean waved at Timmy and the young boy offered a smile before waving back before he and Robin disappeared into the house, and Dean knew he would never see either of them again.

Sonny sauntered up to him next, Sam keeping his distance because he knew Dean needed to say a goodbye, and Dean appreciated it. Sonny looked at Dean for a moment before saying, “Sounds like Timmy’s gonna need some help adjusting.”

“Good thing he’s got you, and this place,” Dean replied easily.

“I always hate to see you go, Dean,” Sonny told him before he pulled him into a hug, thumping him twice on the back and pulling away, his hand squeezing his shoulder. “I can’t thank you enough for this one.”

“Least I could do,” Dean said, and he knew it was the truth. He smiled sadly and said, “We’ll see you around, Sonny.”

“Nah,” Sonny said, knowing that look on Dean’s face. “You probably won’t. But don’t forget I’m here if you need me.”

Sonny clapped him one more time on the shoulder, taking a good look at Dean before he turned around and walked back to the house, pausing on the porch as Sam shook his hand and said something to him, smiling, and Sonny grinned back at him. Dean watched their exchange and straightened up when Sam moved off of the porch and walked to the Impala, and Dean moved to the driver’s side. The brothers got into the car in silence, and Dean started it, turning down the music because it didn’t feel appropriate right then for some reason. Dean waved at Sonny and Sonny nodded back, and Dean pulled away from the House for Boys for not the first time, and he watched it disappear in the rearview mirror.

The moment it was gone, he could breathe again.

The moment it was gone, Sam got his courage.

“I thought that you would have hated this place,” Sam suddenly confessed, turning to look at Dean like he had been holding it back the entire time, his eyes cautious. “I thought that maybe this place was the worst part of your life, and that’s why you didn’t talk about it. But it was really one of the best. So why did you up and leave like you did?”

“Never felt right,” Dean said, shrugging. “Never where I knew I would be forever.”

“Really?” Sam asked skeptically.

“I was only there for two months when I was a teenager, Sam,” Dean snapped a little too impatiently, his hands gripping the wheel. He took a deep breath. “Look, we all think we get it when we’re a teenager, and I thought that I would be able to stay, but I knew I couldn’t. I knew that staying was . . . ridiculous. I had too much to lose if I stayed.”

Sam looked at him, not buying the whole story, but willing to accept this new version that Dean was offering him. Dean glanced over at his brother as he leaned his head back against the seat, hunkering his too-large body into a ball as he closed his eyes, and Dean suddenly felt seasick when he remembered the moment that really changed it all.

 

_Dean stared into the mirror as he tugged at the tie, and he breathed out, running his hands a little anxiously over the white button-down, looking at his neat slacks and the belt, all things that he had gotten at a nearby thrift shop for cheap in a panic the few days warning that Robin gave him before the dance, and it was tonight. Dean felt uneasy—he never did school events, never went to a dance. He couldn’t tell if he was excited, or if he was dreading having the experience, knowing that he would never be able to have this again._

_The door to the room opened, and Dean knew he was the only one of the boys home, so he cleared his throat and said, “Are ties always this damn restricting? It feels like I’m getting strangled by The Force.”_

_There was no response. And then, a voice he didn’t expect just said one word: “Dean.”_

_And he knew it was all over._

_Dean turned, nearly staggering in surprise as he turned to face the figure in the doorway. John Winchester took up nearly the entirety of it—either that or it was Dean’s imagination, knowing a thing or two about John’s anger and knowing it would be enough to fill every bit of space in the Chrysler building top to bottom. Dean withered under John’s intense stare, knowing what would come at him later—how John would throw around his anger at Dean’s recklessness, his irritation over his irresponsible behavior, and his disappointment that Dean hadn’t done what he had told._

_John Winchester was a force that could crush Dean without having to lift a finger, without having to say a word. Just seeing him standing there, looking at him, Dean could feel the energy and resolve to want to stay wavering._

_“Dean,” John said again, “it’s time to go. I’ve got a job in Ohio.”_

_“I didn’t think you would come back for me,” Dean told him numbly, showing signs of his apparently foot-in-mouth syndrome, but John only looked momentarily surprised before he sighed, reaching up and running a hand through his hair._

_“I’m going to be in the car,” John told him, and his eyes flashed with anger when he met Dean’s gaze, and his jaw clenched. “Five minutes, Dean.”_

_John walked away, shuffling through halls Dean had been used to like it was another one of those hunting grounds, and Dean watched him disappear from the doorway, blinking, surprised. He moved to the window to glance out, and he saw the Impala’s lights brightening the side of the house, and he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and moved to his bed and grabbed his pack._

_Dean didn’t have much here. Dean didn’t have much anywhere. He checked, one time under the bed, not bothering to pick up his schoolbooks or anything like that, not bothering to pretend like he was going to need them where he was going. He threw his pack over his shoulder and ran a hand over the footboard he had carved symbols into his first night, when he couldn’t sleep, too afraid of anything that might come for him while he was here, like he was hunted. He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it up, and he pulled the tie off, leaving it on the bed. He took the time to roll up the sleeves of his shirt and unbutton the top two buttons before he took a deep breath and started down the hall, moving like he was walking through a dream._

_He knew John was outside, and he was angry. He knew what his life would be like if he left, and he knew what it would be like if he stayed. He thought about it in the too-long moments it took for him to take every stair, one by one. He tugged his jacket off of the coat rack in front of the door, and he didn’t bother taking the time to pull it on._

_He looked around at the house. He took a good long look at it. And then he thought about how Sonny had told him yesterday how this house had been his second chance, and how it would be Dean’s too. He remembered how Sonny told him that, if he wanted to stay, Sonny would fight for him to stay._

_Dean hesitated on the porch. He hovered there uncertainly in between his two choices, his hand on his backpack clutching the strap tightly. Dean looked at the Impala in front of him, holding his breath._

_And then he saw Sam—curled into a ball, the way he always slept in the car even if his limbs were already starting to grow at the age of twelve, making it look uncomfortable, but Sam had always been able to sleep in the Impala if there was a soft rock station involved. Sam’s head was resting against the window, his mouth open, and his breath fogged the window, in and out. He looked peaceful, and he looked tired—and Dean realized in a surge of protectiveness that almost knocked him off of his feet how much he had missed his little brother._

_He looked at Sam, and he decided._

_Dean crossed the front yard quietly, yanking open the back door of the Impala on the driver’s side instead of taking the passenger seat, shoving his backpack on the floor and climbing in after it, settling in next to Sammy. He closed the door softly before putting the coat he was still clutching in his hands over his brother’s body, and Sam immediately mumbled something and tugged it closer, fast asleep._

_Dean looked at his brother for a moment. And then he looked up out the window._

_Sonny was standing on the porch, gripping the banister hard, like he was forcing himself not to run over to the Impala and forcibly pull Dean out. He was watching Dean through the window—watched how Dean cared for his brother, probably saw the smile Dean hadn’t realized was on his face when he looked down at the sleeping Sammy—and now he met Dean’s eyes, and he saw sadness and understanding. Dean held Sonny’s gaze in a sad goodbye before his father pulled from the driveway and moved away from the house, and Dean looked out the back window and watched as Sonny and his home disappeared behind them, and then Dean looked at his brother and knew that he would chose this over and over again, no matter what._

_Dean fell asleep next to Sam in the backseat. When he woke up, when John woke them when they pulled up to a motel, they were sprawled on top of each other, like exhausted puppies that had just collapsed where they had been wrestling. Sam was overjoyed to see him, his smile brighter than the sun, and his hug was relieved._

_Dean saw some of the fire go out of John’s eyes when he saw it. But it wasn’t enough to save Dean from the flames later._

_But, for the time, it was worth it._

_Dean never let himself regret his choice._

 

“Hey, Dean?” Sam mumbled sleepily from the passenger’s side, without opening his eyes, and Dean looked over at him. Dean didn’t have to make a sound for Sam to know he was listening, but all Sam had to say was, “Thank you. For . . . everything, I guess. Just, thanks.”

Sam was thanking him for coming back. Sam was thanking him for looking out for him. Sam was thanking him for everything he had always done for Sam and everything he had given, and everything he would still do and still give, and Dean felt the emotion in his throat, choking him. He looked at his little brother, sicker and tired, shrinking before his very eyes until he was the size of the sinking sun on the horizon, but Dean knew that Sam didn’t have to thank him—that Dean would always make every choice he has ever made, because they have all been for Sam. And there wasn’t anything wrong with that.

So he didn’t say anything. He let Sam fall asleep to soft rock and the growling hum of the Impala, the way he always did, and Dean drove in nothing but silence and the reassurance that his brother was breathing beside him, and it was all that he ever needed.

He didn’t let himself think about what might happen, or what might become of Sam. He didn’t let himself think about the past or the things that could have been. He didn’t even let him think about John, or all of the men in his life that tried to be the father that he deserved.

Dean took a deep breath, and he drove.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well--that's all, folks.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm glad you stuck through it to the end, and I hope you like it. I'm going to start posting actual stories soon, and it would mean a lot to me if you checked them out!
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> x Slang


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